Silly laws for jolly silly season

A few years ago a mischievous opposition legislator introduced a motion to the Council of the Provinces declaring, more or less, that said upper house of parliament was full of dozy nincompoops who wasted taxpayers' money.

The motion was duly passed by the house. It was only after the DA pointed out its bit of malarkey that the dozy ANC majority reacted with indignation. It was very funny at the time.

Last year, the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs published a draft bill that would make it possible for anyone other than the South African Weather Service predicting a tornado, a hurricane, typhoon, plague of locusts or some such extreme weather to be fined all of R5-million. Or to stew in jail for five years. Repeat offenders could, in theory, face double the fines or twice the time in chookie.

The bill was published for public comment, and like the DA motion of a couple of years ago, no one noticed at the time. Shame on all of us. Especially those journalists who sit in the parliamentary press gallery who, by now, should really have taken more notice of something they obviously thought was just too mundane for words.

The Environmental Affairs Department, not surprisingly, assumed at the time that we were all happy with their draft legislation making it an offence to make fun of the weatherman.

Lesson to be learnt from all of this is that you can't trust this government with anything. Next thing you know, the Department of Sport and Recreation will be passing legislation threatening soccer teams who beat Bafana Bafana with imprisonment and torture. (Which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad idea: our national football side might actually win something for a change.)

With nothing better to do as the silly season wound on, opposition politicians last week accused the authorities of being unduly authoritarian as well as trying to protect the weather service's monopoly. To its credit, the department jiffied up a quick statement from the minister of weather which, I think, did the trick rather nicely.

It was an odd statement more or less acknowledging that maybe the legislation wasn't as cleverly worded as it might have been, but pointing out that it had been the service's sole prerogative to warn of impending climate disaster since 2001.

"If, indeed, the bill's honest attempts to protect South Africans from the potential harmful impacts of false, misleading and/or hoax warnings turn out to have unintended negative consequences that can be addressed in the final amendment, then it will be the public who must be thanked for its interest and involvement," the statement said.

Members of the public were "accordingly urged to not only criticise the current draft, but to possibly propose alternative wording".

This government is extremely busy - even diligent - on the policy front. We have masses of legislation emanating from the executive all the time, not to mention a torrent of mostly well-thought out green and white papers. We have credit, consumer and product safety legislation that make making and selling anything to anyone (what most of us know as "business") a potential minefield.

Three days after Christmas, my dozy accountant sent an e-mail saying she knew someone who could keep my little business compliant with the Promotion of Access to Information Act. For a fee of between R500 and R600. Sitting, as I was, on the beach at the time, I spluttered with indignation before dashing off a reply to the effect that I had recently written a column about the thing and had no intention of drawing up a PAIA-compliant company manual. Unlike my accountant, I already knew the executive had backed off enforcing what it belatedly realised was a bit of unnecessary bureaucracy.

The weather amendment thing will, I have no doubt, turn out to be a storm in a teacup - one that will soon blow over and that will turn out to be little more than a damp squib (which, I know, is not really a meteorological metaphor, but I know how much you all enjoy my throwing clichés at an issue).

Point is: we have just about as much legislation regulating every aspect of our social and commercial lives as we need right now. Well done, government; you can stop now. A bit of enforcement would be nice, though.