Welcome 2010 - South Africa's year!

Bonjour! A Happy New Year to you all - it's been a while since I've updated my blog - mostly because I've been travelling and working abroad in the UK over the last 6 months or so. I'm certainly glad to have left the cold and dreary weather to experience the peak of the South African summer - and it's a hot one at that too!

The sentiment in South Africa about 2010 is certainly very upbeat - not least because of the anticipation of the upcoming FIFA world cup that is going to be held here in some 156 days time (no I did not just work that out - countdown clocks are just about everywhere you can imagine now in Johannesburg and the rest of South Africa!) Having had the job of seeing a sterling performance of South Africa against Brazil last year in the Confed Cup I can say that I am really looking forward to the 2010 matches.

On the work front, I've just completed a stint with a United Nations agency in UK and Brussels which was quite rewarding. I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things with my more journalistic aspirations through the Richmark online newspaper together with Pratish Mistry as well as cartooning on the Wonkie cartoon blog. The blog certainly seems to have taken off tremendously over the last one year with over 6000 daily readers now and still growing steadily!

ANCYL madness

PM made a great cartoon on Wonkie last week covering the outrageous verbal battle between Floyd, Malema (ANCYL) and Helen Zille - a celebrity deathmatch ... lol I think we should all lobby e-tv to get it organised - check out Zille vs Malema deathmatch cartoons

It will be interesting to see if the ANC reins these morons in and reprimand them in some way. All this hate speech should be unacceptable in the new South Africa!

On Gaza and the conflict

Quoting the Economist print edition (8 Jan 09):

WITH luck, the destructive two-week battle between Israel and Hamas may soon draw to an end. But how long before the century-long war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine follows suit? It is hard to believe that this will happen any time soon.

There is little debate that the 100 year war will still be continuing for a long while ahead. I have to admit it's somewhat disheartening reading the BBC Gaza news and commentary - about the lives lost and the prospects of Gaza going forward.

I think it's time for people to stop adopting staunch positions and reflect on their attitudes and the consequences those attitudes have. I echo the sentiments in the Gaza Haiku verse completely - debating on who is right and who is wrong will lead us into another few decades of getting nowhere. A progressive move towards a lasting peace requires maturity and understanding from both sides.

The education crisis in South Africa

After the debacle of the matric results in South Africa this year, it is not surprising that both employers and tertiary institutions lack faith in government statistics on school leavers. It appears that although the pass rate has remained largely the same, the quality of graduates have decreased tremendously over the last 5 years.

If the South African department of education spent more time focusing on the core issues facing the youth in this country, and less time trying to 'normalise' the pass rate statistics, everyone would be better off. I've made a Naledi Pandor cartoon covering popular sentiment in South Africa over her effectiveness in her current role and the apparent success of outcome-based education - do check it out and drop your comments!

Let's hope 2009 is better!

Happy New Year one and all.. things are off to a good start with lots of changes on both the work and personal fronts for me. I'll be travelling a fair bit this year which I am really looking forward to.

Hope the festive Christmas season was a good one for you too and that you've all returned safely from your trips if you did not stay at home.

Future of education in South Africa

Created a comic for the Wonkie cartoon blog for today after a short break from the cartooning over the last week. Given my background the topic is very close to my heart - education. In fact, it's on what I see as the failure of outcome based education in South Africa.

At first I thought it's because I grew up under and experienced the harsher traditional system that I feel the current system is to weak. Then reality set in when I was going through the graduate hiring process at my previous job. I won't go into the depth of the commentary here as I've covered in much detail on Wonkie.. but suffice it to say that school should replicate the real world environment as much as possible. Comparing relative to yourself is great if you want to be the Buddha, but if you need to survive in the real world and bring food to the table - OBE is just not going to cut it.

Update

Hola todo! Just a quick update in case you've all decided I've gone AWOL.. had a short break with the family and spent some much needed time with the kids.. great fun and a well deserved break - at least I think so!

Also caught up with Jo in India today - awful what happened there over the last week. Glad he's ok. The terrorism thing has gone a bit bananas over the last few years. Islam certainly isn't winning any brownie points with the rest of the world. Conspiracy theories are aplenty about how the US is trying to bring Islam in disrepute by carrying out attacks naming them as the perpetrators.. now there's an interesting thought.