Fraud prevention via SMS

I have written before about the heavy feels to use banking services in SA. One thing that initially annoyed me was that I receive an SMS every time I log into the website, withdraw, deposit, or any other action. I’ve never been a bit SMS guy, so I treated it as clutter initially. I realized, however, that’s it’s actually a great security measure. If I’m not at my computer and get an SMS about logging in, I know to immediately call and report fraud. Not a bad idea after all, SA.

Swaziland

I had some adventures in Swaziland a while back. I set off with 7 others for a weekend of rafting and the Brushfire annual music festival.

 A visit from some larger-than-life party animals.

The first part of the adventure was just navigating the roads. It’s a ~5 hr drive in good circumstances, and roads in SA are rarely good circumstances. In this case, the road is single lane each way for most of the drive, and they were doing work on probably ~40km of road. This meant lots of stops as they turned the road into a one-way alternating road. It’s classic SA road work: rather than devoting a lot of resources to quickly finishing sections, they tear up big chunks that take forever to complete. (On the way back some signalman switched the sign on the other end too early, and we ended up dodging oncoming cars for most of the stretch.)

My car eventually made it to the border, where we stopped at a tiny border crossing – 2 guards on each side with not much activity. Both the SA and Swazi guards were watching the final of the SA soccer league (the Orlando Pirates came out champions), and that struck me as an interesting statement.

After the border post we bumped along dirt roads for several km. Swazi was truly a sleepy country as a whole and sparsely populated; the whole country felt like rural hill country Texas – and had the same beauty to me. Most of the country is ringed by a range of low mountains, so it really feels separate/quasi cut off from its neighbors. It’s also the last remaining absolute monarchy in Africa, though that has recently been challenged by riots and I don’t anticipate that lasting too much longer.

A friend of mine sells insurance in Swaziland and said she had to modify their policies when she encountered an issue. “Where do I put my other wives? You mean I can only insure one wife and kids as my family?” Their policies now accommodate multiple wives. (The king had to stop taking more wives because of a tight government budget.)

Bush Fire was different than I expected. It was much smaller – maybe 1000 people there on Saturday night. The crowd was much whiter (~50%?) than I anticipated; lots of Portuguese speakers, which I peg either as Mozambicans or tourists who came over from Moz. At ~$30 for a one-day ticket, however, they definitely weren’t aiming this at the local crowd.

Between acts at Bush Fire 2011.

That was also the evening of the Champions League final, and they deferred to this by setting up a tent with a projected screen. The place was absolutely packed; I got their early and got a seat, but didn’t leave when my group couldn’t find a spot because there would be no reclaiming my prime real estate. The trash talk was lively and the elbows were sharp when jockeying for space. In the end Barcelona handily beat Man U and made it look pretty. I’d say more than half the crowd was pulling for Man U, however.

I can truthfully say I’ve been all over Swaziland, because the next day we drove ~ 2 hours to the rafting site across the country. Half was on dirt roads. There is no way even with good directions I could find my way back to where we went in/came out of the river.

The photos of the king and king's mother.

On our way out that night my car realized we had entered the country a different way than the rest of the group, so we exited by the main border post to SA – which meant there was a metal building with marked parking spaces outside.

Swaziland was beautiful. It’s definitely impoverished, but for now you can visit a mostly undisturbed country and enjoy it.

So this is why they have electric blankets

After a year of living in Joburg, I have to lodge a complaint against the architects who built most of the residential city: you guys need to get with the game.

My apartment (and most other apartment/townhouse complexes) have decent security: electrified fences, boom gates with retracting tire spikes, 24/7 guard, and a fingerprint-activated entry system.  However, what lies behind that security leaves much to be desired.

Where to begin.  Joburg gets hot in the summer (reaching 30 C) and cold in the winter (occasional <0 C frosts).  However, they use single-pane windows, and the ubiquitous concrete construction doesn’t retain/block heat very well.  I have never been in a house, even nice ones, with central AC or heat, though some houses have built-in space heaters (like heated floors in a certain room, or a heating element built into a wall).  Ceiling fans are also rare.

Want to have people over?  They will probably have to park outside all of that fancy security.  You’re lucky if you get 2 parking spots for a 2-bed apartment, and you’re very lucky if they are both covered (typically one close and covered, one uncovered further away).  My roommate and I are “very lucky”… but our parking spaces are end to end, meaning one person must move to let the other out.  In addition, they are under a parking garage, but there is no covered walkway from the apartments to the garage, meaning you may be able to get groceries out of the car and stay dry only to get drenched carrying them in.

BEE: not a panacea

I got a new perspective at a braai a while back when the topic turned to apartheid.

My generation – or at least these Afrikaner test subjects – weren’t really affected by/had few memories of apartheid.  Apartheid fell when they were ~10 years old, and for them the end of apartheid simply meant black kids showed up at their schools.

However, they do have some strong memories of the emotions surrounding the event; as kids they may not have known the intricacies, but they could read the atmosphere.  One told a story of how their principal announced at school that he wanted to see the “Black kids” in his office.  He meant kids from a family named Black, but this was lost on some parents who called and threatened him personally.

Another person’s dad was in the police at the time, and she remembers him getting death threats by phone.

One of the things that was said that I think summarizes BEE – and a lot of other big programs like it – is that “everyone thinks they are getting screwed,” in the words of one.  Blacks don’t see progress fast enough in the form of jobs, and then better jobs.  Whites feel like they’re almost discarded at the bottom of the pile.  Indians/colourds feel like they were left dangling before (they had more privileges than blacks, but weren’t considered white) and are again stuck in limbo (since they only yield “partial credit” under BEE).

The international do-gooder

People in developing nations can be bitter towards international governments and NGOs that come in attempting to help but do so without regard to local culture.

However, that high-minded but condescending person doesn’t always need to be a full-fledged foreigner.  On the Mozambique trip there was a Nigerian who, like many well-off Nigerians, was educated in the UK.  When she saw people on the island living on poverty and farming plots she wondered aloud why they didn’t move across the bay to the city, where “surely they have affordable housing.”  I almost laughed out loud.  South Africa still doesn’t have affordable housing for millions, and a drive around Lagos should be enough to dispel any expectation of easily available affordable housing – especially in one of the poorest nations on the continent.  I’m sure she could talk all about development theory and her whole purpose in being in Africa was to talk to people for a book she was writing, but she was missing the reality under her nose.

I recently read A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul, a book I highly recommend.  It’s well-written and a good story, and it contains lots of truth about Africa.  (Be advised that part of the book does revolve around an affair.) At one point the main (African) character reads some articles by a well-known European researcher in an African country who works for the government or a development group and realizes that "He knew so much, had researched so much.  He must have spent weeks on each article.  But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than [other characters]" because his was purely intellectual research.