by Johann Theron
South Africa may be the rape capital of the world, for not only personal rapes of men, women and children, but also for organizational rapes. This article is not however, about individual/personal rape cases but of organizational rape, although pretty much the same conditions and effects apply – such as the requirement to say NO. The difference is that while everybody in the world seems to abhor the act of rape, the act of raping an organization seems to be fair play. A simple example is the South African constitution where individual protection against rape is promised, while the rape of Afrikaner institutions is seen as fair discrimination.
It is also not about the West raping the earth with carbon dioxide or the popular intelligence rape someone like Angela Merkel may have experienced as per Edward Snowden.
This article is not about a political party such as hypothetically the ANC raping its own country/continent or the big money powers such as hypothetically Goldman Sachs raping a country such as South Africa (for gold), or the Ukraine (to get at Russia), but it is at a lower level of organizations affecting people in communities. The assumption is that raping such organizations would effectively rape and tear a community apart, resulting in effectively a traumatized society. Where a personal rape affects one person or family, organizational rape which can be caused by one person, affects thousands of people.
Initial thoughts of prospective organizations at the community level are companies like Woolworths or Shell. For the most part these companies are modelled on Walmart that actually provides cost-effective goods even to rural areas and they are also represented in industry institutions that interface with governments, providing some form of quality and governance. That they provide unnecessary goods pushing the consumerist envelope is another topic.
Another possibility is financial institutions where the rape verdict becomes slightly warmer because of the long-term effect of inflation that banks may capitalize on or the insurance companies that may make more money out of the constant premium stream than their subscribers do. It is true that in countries where financial community co-ops are used, inhabitants get more value, but having that option and not exercising it prevents inhabitants from crying rape from centralized banks. However, some actually already do that in South Africa.
Another possibility is communications companies with cell towers everywhere. They appear to control the municipalities where no limit is set on the maximum number of cell towers per area. This is clearly a shortage of intellectual capacity and although radio waves have medical effects on humans, it is not yet seen as rape, unless a price such as unreasonable cost/minute contributes to this distress. The positive effect of improved productivity for communities, if harnessed, should also come into play where some communities such as Irene (close to Pretoria) or Sandhurst (close to Johannesburg) are examples.
One type of business that ratchets the possibility of rape up a notch or two are land developers. Their spreadsheets dictate what they do and customer cashflow (towards their own pockets) determines how fast they do it. Without proper town planning or architectural design, they deliver houses that were planned around the cheapest materials they can get instead of aiming for the South African ideal, as derived from 300 hundred years of building experience. One could say that surely the house prices are cheap due to cheap materials applied, the question is, were quality standards actually applied such as damp proofing or proper cement mixes? In my own case – not – so I feel used, cheated, etc.
But the latest contender to the best organizational rapist crown appears to be the Church. One overt example is the new Pope Francis appointing McKinsey to fix the Vatican Bank’s corruption – how much corruption we will never know but if it is at the same scale as Pastoral “rape” of young boys, then it probably becomes unbearable.
A covert example is the South African Dutch Reformed Church, facing a substantial loss of members across the country after 1994. A lot of qualified pastors or dominees lost their jobs and the drop in pension affected many more. Universities are doing away with Afrikaans-language training which means that the Church may on its own decide to move its entire congregations to the English version in some secret future time schedule – as Doxa Deo is doing. Apart from that, the actuary of the Church is probably doing fine adjustments and long-term planning to protect the dominees currently employed. What this amounts to is that as individual congregation turnover gradually drops at say 5% per year, the incumbent dominee’s salary increases by 5%. Let’s say that a general guideline is that salaries are 50% of turnover, then the guideline may change to 55% the next year. However, to lessen the visible effect of this on congregational spreadsheets, the dominee will be quite happy to only increase his pensionable salary and nobody will be the wiser. All this happens while the congregational turnover drops and by the time it drops to R900 000, the salary percentage might be 80%, with a pensionable portion 200% more than originally contracted. The insidious effect is that the dominee will, without really knowing it, manage the turnover downwards in order to get more benefit. The congregation will also not realize it, but once the turnover drops below R900 000, the church may be sold or handed to the Synod. From past examples, selling a Church is an emotional issue and has a heart-wrenching effect on people. Especially if they do not understand how they got there in the first place.
The devastating effect on communities is psychological and heart-wrenching because theologically, the structure of congregations over the world forms a body, aptly called the “Body of Christ” and when that gets raped, serious outfall will be the order of the day.
This comparative description of the raping of organizations can also be found in literature. For example a book by Howard F Stein: Nothing personal, just business – A guided journey into organizational darkness. While it generally describes commercial organizations, there are a few cases of non-profit organizations from which comparisons can be drawn. Essentially it describes the psychoanalytic effect of thoughts inducing a physical outcome. Where a positive example is happiness resulting in the clapping of hands, a negative example is defensive thoughts resulting in self-enriching by crippling the client. In both cases though, the person does not really know that he/she is doing it.
