Big Brother is Listening

On the telephone pole outside the wife’s work is an old poster for that ANC rag, The New Age, advertising the headline: RICA CHAOS REIGNS!

The headline conjured images of burning buildings and frothy-mouthed citizens running around fornicating and screaming – a bit like a Rick Astley concert – but for once in South Africa the truth was not stranger than my mind’s fiction.

RICA is, in a nutshell, the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act. It requires anyone with a mobile phone in SA to register their name, number, and address with the government.

This is supposedly not so they can listen in to your phone calls to see if you voted for Helen Zille, but to monitor despicable acts like trafficking child pornography or buying anything from Verimark.

I eagerly await the first court case featuring a parent who’s little rascal has been filming his mates shagging and sending it around, and the phone’s been registered to the mother because the kid didn’t have an electricity bill in his name.

But that is surely still to come, the alleged “chaos” that TNA (that’s what they’re trying to call it) writes about had nothing to do with RICA at all, but was an unknown fault in the Vodacom and MTN network.

RICA, for over two million cellphone users, caused what couldn’t be called more than an annoyance as their phones were cut off and they had to trudge down to their service provider with a bank statement and ID papers.

By TNA’s standards of verb usage, it seems, the act of looking down to notice that one’s shoelace is untied would be classified as “chaos”.

The irony is that this grotesquely sensationalist headline comes from the mouthpiece for the very government that’s about to stuff a muttoncloth down our throats and wrap duct tape around our heads in the form of the Protection of Information Bill.

TNA’s slogan is “One Country. One Paper.” – hopefully this is not a vision of the future from the ANC’s propaganda arm.

And by then I’d have had to RICA this blog… who will I complain to then?