The stupidest plan ever. so what you do, right, is atart a home school.

You tell people that they can do their matric in one year - which is actually pretty feasible, for a small, inten sive school - and you charge 'em a grand a month. The pupils love it, especially since they' don't have to do homework, and get great grades all the time. Then you download a bunch of exam papers at the end of the year, tippex out bits of t ehm, put the department of education's logo on the top, and give them to them as the matric papers. Which they then realise is completely different to all their mates' papers. The con itself is pretty clever, so long as you realise that you have to shut up shop and run at the end of the first year. Which Chavron Lewis didn't do, and now faces R400k of fraud charges. Remember, kids, crime doesn't pay (unless you do it right). Win a million rand by sucking at your job So. Farms in north UKZN are, frankly, fucked. This whole land reapproriation thi ng.... I mean, it's all very laudable in principle, but it assumes that any monk ey can farm; that all farmers are uneducated roughnecks with more muscles than b rains, and therefore you can just give the farm to any old bugger off the street and he'll be able to run it. Which is, of course, complete bullshit; farming is a speialised profession, requiring both a broad and deep knowledge of horticult ure, husbandry, irrigation, and so on. As a result of the same ham-fisted approa ch that's led to half of Zim starving to death, hundreds of farms are paralysed and non-functional across UKZN. Still, there is a silver lining; Agriculture hea d Mjwara, who has resigned and is facing 12 counts of financial misconduct, is g etting a R1.5m severance payment. So there you have it, the trick only the best and the brightest can pull off; suck so badly at your job hundreds of people los e theirs, and you get a million bucks as a reward. What'cha gonna do, what'cha gonna do when they come for you? Lie down and cover your head, I reckon. Durban cops over the last couple of week have taken the Security minister's advice to heart, and started using excissive force. I was actually wrong about one bit of it - it turns out you can get an i nterdict against the cops to stop them from doing stuff they're not allowed to d o, like killing or harassing you, as (X) proves. Otherwise, a bunch of guys invo lved in a cash-in-transit heist suspects have been killed, along with a few ATM robbers, and a few suspected of killing a police superintendant. As well as each other, and the odd family. Oh, and a car on the freeway. And you thought gun c ulture in the gangs was bad... And the beat goes on... And so the saga of Radebe continues. A week ago, his driver shoots out someone's tires; two days later, the prosecution documents are finally sent through for a n offence he commited five months ago - presumably the documents got lost in the post, explaining the surely accidental perfrect political timing. The MEC of tr ansport convenes a meting of VIPs to smack their wrists, thus coming across as t he good guy, while Radebe is mentioned in every article about every blu'light of ence commited, thus painting him as the bad guy. He's taken some time off sick, which I think is definately the best idea, what with political conspiracies in t his country being a little too quick to devolve into violence. The sound of one gun clapping You know that sound? It happens when it's really dark, and you can't sleep; a we ird little kick in the distance. And you think "ah, it's probably just a dog goi ng through a trash can, or some drunk falling against a shutter, or something." but a dark voice skulking in the shadows of your mind refuses to listen, hiding behind pillars, says "Nah, man... something really bad is going down.' I get tha

t feeling a lot, these days, but the really funy thing is, it's always followed by the suspicion that all the bad things are in fact good things in a really imp ressive disguise. Two professors try to get the academic senate to consider a do cument outlining the failure of the university's desegregation and academic free dom policies, and when the vice chancellor blocks them, go to the media and tell them - which is pretty much their duty, since their roles as academics and publ ic servants makes them and their institution accountable to the public. As a res ult, they get disciplined for 'bringing the insitution into disrepute.' But the VC does this a lot, and this time it's getting a lot of media attention. Michael Polanyi talked about the tacit knoledge needed to live in a culure. You can't just have the laws, he says; he people need to know the art of living th ose laws. As the americans learnt in Iraq, he's right; you can't just expect peo ple to take up liberal democracy with upraised arms, singing hallelujah; they ne ed to know what it is, learn to do it. So Maybe (?) is right, and the police nee d to use excessive force; certianly, the Durban cops have taken it to heart; eve ry time I open a paper these days, they've shot someone else. but it's always so meone in a cash-in-transit heist, or who's killed a cop. Sure, the problem is th e justice system - people need to be tried in absentia, and senteced quickly, fo r punishment to be precieved as punishment - but it's a lot of darkness to be sh owing. The ANC is uing language that mostly reminds me of Soviet Communism - pur ges and party loyalty and redeployment - but in the process is doing itself more harm than Cope can dream of doing. On the other side, the Cope leader in KZN so unds like an over-bling, under-brained - always armed, describes himself as a so ldier, willing to die for his beliefs; Lekota, rather more sensibly, is telling people to keep quiet in public, but vote with their conscience. Look. It's a truism, and it's one that you've heard a hundred times, but it is a lways darkest before the dawn. The scandals now are all at the highest level, in volving the biggest players in whatever field; this is the point at which the sy stem breaks down, one way or the other, the same as everywhere else, everywhen e lse, and SA is the last resort; if it falls, then africa at large might as well be written off. Sure, everybody's using incredibly dramatic dialogue, but these are dramatic times. I think it'll work out alright, though; still, I can't shake that little dark voice....