Waiting for the sms from the vaccine authority seems rather like standing in an orderly queue for a lifeboat on the Titanic. Admirable, but unwise.

Completing the process at the DisChem headquarters in Midrand took five hours.

Sure it was a Ben Hur, but without exception every Dischem employee I encountered – from the guard who showed us our place in the queue to director Stan Gates who walked into the “recovery room” to ask recipients how things were progressing  – was obviously bent on being helpful.

It was one of the seminal new South African experiences: along with the first democratic election in 1994 and hosting the Football Word Cup in 2010.

We were in this fight against COVID together, and determined to beat the lurgy.

On social media I learn that many friends have received their vaccine must quicker and more efficiently. Good luck, I say to them. We are in this fight together.

It seems that all of us now have to wait 42 days to get the second jab.

There is a bid to tell us this is the most efficacious application of the vaccine. I don’t believe it.

We are being made to wait so that more people can get the first dose of the limited supplies of  vaccine available.

Remember the people now telling us about the need to wait are the same people whe were telling us 14 months ago that we did not need masks because they were afraid we would gobble up the available masks to the detriment of the health workers.

So wait I will.

Not at all sure where I will go to get the second jab. It would be great to avoid the five-hour process at GenChem, even if this means missing another chance to see  my new-found pandemic friends.

Discovery boss Adrian Gore has written a letter saying members should try the sites being set up by his medical aid society.

He seems confident there will be enough Pfizer to dispense the second injections.

From his mouth to God’s ear!

President Cyril Ramaphosa just tightened a band of cold steel around my testicles – metaphorically speaking, of course – telling us that South Africa would chuck out two million does of Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

He’s blaming a contamination scare at its source in the the United States.

To his credit, Ramaphosa acted swiftly, decisively and courageously locking down South Africa early on in the pandemic.

However his government’s record in dispensing the vaccine this year as been less than impressive. Plainly speaking it has been marked by dithering and, by all accounts, corruption.

That is the antithesis of the British experience where Boris Johnson fiddled at the start of the pandemic, costing thousands of lives, but has done a sterling job of getting vaccine into Britons’ arms.

Could the G7 come to our aid?

At their summit in Cornwall last weekend, the leaders of Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy committed themselves to providing a billion doses of vaccine to poorer countries within the year.

Critics say this is a drop in the ocean for the developing world that needs at least ten times that amount.

We can talk about lifting the intellectually property rights to allow vaccine to be manufactured in South Africa, Senegal and other countries ready and able to do it.

If successful, that would be months away.

We need a quicker solution if we are to achieve the much vaunted herd mentality and avoid the plethora of variants to which we no longer may attach a national appellation.

Away with the political correctness and down with the blame game, I say with unashamed selfishness as I prepare to line up for my second dose.

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Of course President Donald Trump would back his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsanaro.

They both put the short-term political benefit of climate change  denialism above the long-term interests of generations too young to vote for them. And the man known as the Trump of the tropics showed at the G7 summit in Biarritz last weekend that he shares the American leader’s convenient incoherence.

Without regard for the ten other countries in the Amazon region, Bolsanaro refused to accept the $22 million from the group of seven richest nations on Earth to help fight the thousands of forest fires threatening the area known as the planet’s tree lung.

Then he said, he would take the money if French President Emmanuel Macron withdrew that statement calling him a liar and hoping Brazil would get a better leader.

Finally he cast aside the need for an apology and agreed to accept the G7 help, provided Brazil given a free hand to determine how it would be spent.

Macron spoke at the meeting he hosted of the need to address the fires raging around Africa’s rain forests which are second largest lung on Earth.

There was no reticence expressed by any of the five African leaders – President Cyril Ramaphosa included –  invited to the G7 summit.

They have yet to hear details, most importantly the magnitude of the help.

Experts advise against making too easy a comparison between  the fires in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo showing up on  NASA maps and actually out numbering those in the conflagration in the Amazon basin.

The African fires are not actually in the rain forest. They are a seasonal phenomenon caused by farmers conducting slash and burn agriculture.

Denis Maclean of UN Disaster Risk Reduction   says the damage from fires is unacceptably high on both sides of the Atlantic. 

155000 square kilometers of rain forest have been lost  to fire in the last decade , commercial logging and palm oil cultivation in the past decade.

West Africa has lost 90% of its forest coverage in the past century.

Forest fires kill 300 000 people a year.

With population growth projected to increase fivefold by the end of the century, it impacts dramatically on the sustainability of the planet.

Any money directed to Africa should be used not only to immediately fight the fires but on educating people on their relationship with their environment.  

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Police fired rubber bullets to disperse protesters on the highway in the Meyerton area who made off with the beer on the truck.

Residents of the Sicelo informal settlement took their protest to the R59 highway which they blocked with burning tyres.

They then parked the hijacked truck across the road and made off with its contents and keys.

Police communications officer Mavela Masondo said they were doing everything possible to clear the highway which was closed during the morning rush hour.

The so-called service delivery protest is South African political parlance for demonstrations against government’s failure to distribute basic resources citizens depend on like water, electricity, sanitation infrastructure, land, and housing.

This has been a commitment  of successive African National Congress government since the onset of democracy 24 years ago.

The disruptive action flies in the face of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise at  various international fora – most lately the G7 in Canada – that South Africa is an excellent investment destination.

Service delivery protests traditionally increase in number and intensity as the winter cold bites in unheated informal settlements.

With elections less than a year away, the ANC, is being careful to use minimum force to contain the demonstrations.

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