Mandy de Waal's Blog

How Online Paywalls Are Changing Journalism

"As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot." - Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Shirky thinks 2012 will yield a critical mass of readers will be willing to pay for news online. Also on the show, Denise Warren, general manager for NYTimes.com, who explains the New York Times paywall strategy.

I've got two words for ineffective government...

Zuma's performance agreements with government ministers are a toothless tiger. What's needed to drive performance and service delivery is bite.

Economist Mike Schüssler certainly didn't mince his words when he spoke at the 9th UASA South African Employment Report held in Johannesburg recently. His message was twofold.

1. The government has failed the country in the employment stakes.

2. Government is the biggest employer in South Africa and is being paid too much, to the detriment of growing employment.

The tragedy, as pointed out in Schüssler's talk, is the anomaly that South Africa is at once Africa's biggest economy and yet has the highest rate of unemployment with some 60% of the population jobless.

"If South Africa was just able to up its employment numbers to the average ratio in Africa of 64%, adult employment in the country would have grown with seven-million jobs," Schüssler said.

Governments has failed on job creation
But wait for the punch line. iAfrica reports that Schüssler said government employees are being paid a premium of 40 percent more than the private sector. This as government continues to fail the country on job creation – an issue vital to the creation of social and economic stability.

Schüssler goes on to say that the government pay roll is costing the country too much and that: “SA can't create jobs but it can give big wage increases to government employees and this leads to the problem that a lot more people become economically inactive."

I've got two words to say to government in response to this and they're not “Schüssler's right”, which of course he is. Those two words are: variable pay.

The concept is very simple. Variable pay is essentially a “pay for performance” system that has become increasingly popular in the corporate world where a recessionary environment has limited salary increases yet demanded that business increases performance without increasing resources.

Recent research by Hewitt Associates showed that as many as 80% of companies surveyed will use variable pay this year. The survey covered 6000 organisations in 46 different countries.

Variable play increasingly popular globally
The reason why variable pay is becoming increasingly popular is that it works to boost productivity and accountability. Blanket salaries hardly incentivise people to go that extra mile. Variable salaries linked to the achievement of clear goals encourage under-performers and non-performers to work harder and get things done.

Then there's the matter of self-determination. On a variable pay structure people feel they have some control over what they could get paid. As long as there is transparency in the measurement of goals and people see that performers are rewarded and non-performers are not rewarded, the variable pay system is both effective and credible.

To extend the accountability established by a variable pay system, politicians who err should be made to pay for their misdemeanours. For example Jacob Modise, CEO of the Road Accident Fund, would be forced to pay back the R693 000 he received for serving on the Blue IQ board because National Treasury forbids employees who work at one government job being paid for work done with another state entity.

Zuma's performance agreements a toothless tiger
Interestingly enough Jacob Zuma has signed performance agreements with all of his ministers that have stated outputs, but there are absolutely no penalties for defaulting. In fact, the person responsible for overseeing the 'efficacy' of this toothless tiger – Collins Chabane – said that the performance agreements would not be used “as a stick”.

If there's no incentive for performance or penalty for non-performance, what's the point?

It's about time government got to work for the people who voted them into power and the tax payers who pay their salaries. Variable pay may just make them do that.

Originally written for ITWeb.

Patriot games

The World Cup dream has arrived, but don't forget to return to the hard work of fighting corruption and nation building when the world packs up and goes home.

"I gotta feeling that tonight's gonna be a good night

That tonight's gonna be a good night

That tonight's gonna be a good good night"

Orlando Stadium in Soweto is rocking as The Black Eyed Peas infuse the crowd with Fifa fever for the opening ceremony of the 2010 Soccer World Cup. A beaming Fifa President Sepp Blatter and South African President Jacob Zuma were on the stage earlier, and soon the show will give way to Freshly Ground and Shakira singing “Waka Waka (this Time for Africa)”.

The flags, painted faces, open smiles and euphoria is reminiscent of 1995, South Africa's halcyon 'rainbow nation' days when SA's rugby captain Francois Pienaar and then President Nelson Mandela held the Rugby World Cup high in the air and our nation rejoiced. A pivotal moment that later became a book, and then a movie directed by Clint Eastwood; that memory of unity was deeply etched into South Africa's collective consciousness.

Small wonder then that current President Jacob Zuma dedicated the World Cup to Mandela. The 91-year-old elder statesman was pivotal in bringing Fifa's shindig to South Africa, but more so, he embodies a more carefree, hopeful, and less troubled time.

Bruised rainbow nation
It's been a difficult few years. From Polokwane to Zuma's election as president; to our first recession in 17 years; to the violent service delivery protests; to Malema; to Chancellor House; to the rolling electricity blackouts; to the murder of Eugene Terre'Blanche; back to Malema and the realisation that we are a nation divided with deep racial wounds; to strikes, more strikes and the threats of strikes; to corruption scandal after corruption scandal after corruption scandal.

Like a battered wife reeling from all those beatings and desperately hoping for a better life, the World Cup has come right on cue, offering a dream that is all too easy to believe in. It is the romance of the game, the seduction of being in the global view, of the world's celebrities landing at OR Tambo and kissing the African earth they call home. It is the advertisement that the 2010 Soccer World Cup unites us all under the banner of 1 Goal – the promise of delivering education for all in Africa. It is the dream that the 2010 Soccer World Cup will make South Africa a better nation. After all, it is our time, or as the song goes, “this time for Africa”.

The extent of the euphoria experienced by South Africa as the games begin is significant, but it speaks eloquently to our desperation to divert our gaze from government's lack of service delivery, mismanagement, greed and corruption. We have had such a hard time of it lately that we desperately need to let go, to party, to forget our collective troubles.

Sweet dreams
As Desmond Tutu said elatedly when he stepped towards the microphone at Orlando Stadium to speak at the opening concert before the kick off: “Can you feel it – can you touch it? It is unbelievable man. Wake me up, wake me up. What a lovely dream.” The World Cup has come right on cue, offering a dream that is all too easy to believe in.

Tutu has hit the nail on the head. The 2010 Soccer World Cup is a dream. It is a moment of fantasy that we can all retreat into for a brief period of time to escape the Selebi trial; the fact that the ANC Youth League is trying to make the Western Cape ungovernable; that the Blue IQ directors were milking the system blind; that we have a government that refuses to hold the criminal and unethical accountable for their actions.

It is a dream, and like all dreams it is not based on reality. Like all dreams, it will exist for a short period of time during which we will be able to get lost in it, until we have to wake up. And the end point of this dream will be the final whistle, and the world will pack up and go home.

That's when we'll be nursing a collective headache and will have to return to reality. That's when we'll realise that the benefit of the 2010 Soccer World Cup wasn't as widespread as we'd hope it would be.

It will also be about the time the Mail & Guardian will receive 1 700 arch lever files of tender documents that have until now been kept under lock and key by the Soccer World Cup Local Organising Committee (LOC). The Mail & Guardian recently won a legal battle to get access to the LOC's tender documents, and as the final games are being played, the investigative paper will likely be poring over the documents to uncover who tenders were awarded to, who the ultimate beneficiaries of those tenders were, and whether there was an impropriety with the tender process.

Given South Africa's corruption climate and Fifa's tarnished track record, it's likely that 2010 corruption stories will flow thick and fast after the end whistle, and many of these obviously will be broken by the Mail & Guardian.

So while it's fine to feel the Fifa fever, know that it's delusion and that a time will come to wake up and get back to the reality that is South Africa – the hard work of trying to make government accountable, and of fighting greed and corruption.

While we watch and get lost in the beautiful game, let's not completely take our eye off the ball.

Opinion editorial originally written for ITWeb.