The road to partition

How America can establish a new logic of power in the African subcontinent

For small nations there are few times when the stars align to open a window to heaven, but it seems that for us pale natives of the southern wild, just such a vault has manifested itself. Of course, this is not to say that it will be easy to squeeze through this narrow wicket gate, but with hell on our tails, we have little other option.

From the Western perspective, South Africa is a story of misery and dashed hopes for liberal universalists, just as it is for us orphaned colonial stragglers caught in the web of their ambitions at the height of the unipolar moment.

But today, there is a peculiar arrangement of factors that threatens us with far too much of a good time, and offers our sympathisers across the ocean an opportunity to offer a pragmatic shoulder to lean on, while securing a key strategic position for the coming frozen conflict with the Eastern Alliance.

There are three reasons reforming South Africa like the previous system did is impossible. First, only 4% of black people vote for any party that isn’t hardline black-nationalist/socialist. Second, the previous regime had been introducing reforms for 23 years by the time Mandela was released; the present one is in a process of acceleration. Third, there is no counter-elite, because of reason one, and because of the use of BEE to entangle the remaining white oligarchs.

We have to break the ring of power.

What this essay is, is an analysis of the balance of forces in South Africa. It is not intended just to be a propaganda piece, but a cheat sheet for foreigners to understand the players, their desires, and their powers.

I will deal with the Afrikaners and their potential destiny in another post, because it has a much more exotic and ambitious character if they have the will to grasp it.

But here, we will simply talk about partition. At first it will look grim, but by the end, the possibilities for change will be apparent, and ready-to-hand.

Americans can forget about war, or even trade sanctions. The ANC’s death grip can be released by simply drizzling a few dollars into a couple of local organisations.

South Africa’s geopolitical significance:

South Africa may not be a very vibrant economy, but it contributes an extraordinary amount of essential minerals to the global economy. Quoting from the University of Witwatersrand Mining Institute:

16 commodities ranked in the Top 10 internationally. South Africa has the largest reserves of Platinum-group metals (PGMs; 88%), Manganese (80%), Chromite (72%) and Gold (13%) known reserves in the world. It is ranked second in Titanium minerals (10%), Zirconium (25%), Vanadium (32%), Vermiculite (40%) and Fluorspar (17%). In addition, the country contains 17% of the world’s antimony reserves. […] the country is ranked in the top three globally in terms of production of PGMs (59%), Vanadium (25%), Ferrochrome (39%), Alumino-silicates (60%), Vermiculite (35%), Zirconium (32%), Titanium minerals (19%), Manganese ore (17%) and Antimony (2%), with its Gold (8%), Coal[3] (4%), Iron ore (4%), Ferro-silicon, Silicon metal and Fluorspar ranked in the Top Ten globally.

In addition, the Western Cape is home to one of the richest and purest deposits of rare earth elements on earth, hampered by slow turnaround on mineral rights applications and Black Economic Empowerment requirements for doing business. The deposit at steenkampskraal is over ten times the concentration of normal rare earth mines, as well as being a rocky ore rather than sandy, making extraction far more lucrative. The Northern Cape is also home to a significant deposit of Uranium, copper and manganese.

The Cape is also one of only two routes to trade between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the other being the Suez Canal, owned by China-aligned Egypt. It is a vital military access point to both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Frans Cronje

As relatively recent episodes showed, the Suez Canal is vulnerable to local destabilisation. Both during the grounding of the Ever Given and the harassment of ships by the Somali pirates and the Houthi rebels, the safety of this shipping lane is not guaranteed.

And yet, at just the moment the Cape of Good Hope became the most important shipping lane in the world, it was not prepared to take on the load. Promises to refurbish and upgrade the Port of Cape Town and streamline its infrastructure and workforce have come to nought, and it remains among the worst-performing ports in the world, according to World Bank reports.

But all of this aside, the biggest function of South Africa on the international stage is providing a blueprint for multiculturalism and decolonisation. As Samuel Huntington once put it in a visit in the 1990s, we are a “cleft state” – a country where two different civilisations with contrary geopolitical alignments are forced into a single political system.

Without this one success story, it would be an impossible selling point for the West at large. This is why so many are trying to hold onto the South African national ideal despite its obvious implausibility – if it doesn’t work here, it raises the question of whether it is likely to work at all.

The ANC’s foreign policy

At the risk of stating the obvious, the ANC is in love with the East. While our state relies on the West for much of its trade, the ruling party has long hoped for the right opportunity to shift its allegiance to the East, and has recently shown this inclination rather boldly.

When the Russians invaded Ukraine, the ANC adopted a formally neutral position, but in private celebrated the end of American hegemony in a cocktail bash at the Russian embassy. They plan to host Vladimir Putin this year, in defiance of an global warrant issued by the Americans for his arrest.

Additionally, while naval drills with the Eastern powers are not new, the recent ones have achieved opprobrium for the fact that military drills with the Americans have been turned down, leading to a rebuke from certain American Congressmen, though it seems unlikely their Bill (HR145) will pass the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and so is justifiably ignored by our politicians. New drills now include Iran.

But the biggest benefactor is China. ANC cadres are regularly sent to the Chines Communist Party training school set up in the former mining town of Venterskroon, while our officials are sent to China to learn how they run their state-owned enterprises. The Chinese benefit from a special economic zone in Limpopo province, and has South Africa footing much of the bill, and police are taught Chinese to give the Chinese colonists privileged service delivery. This has paved the way for big loans from the China Development Bank.

BRICS, an increasingly outdated moniker, has seen some significant expansion in recent years. While looked at as a mere statement of West-vs-Rest resentment, it is more ambitious. It is actually composed of real institutions, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the New Development Bank.

The membership of these organisations overlaps considerably, and the eagerness of new countries to join has only accelerated as a result of the recent peace deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The normalisation of relations with Egypt, Syria, Iran and Israel, coupled with the now-paused programme of dedollarisation.

The entirety of South Africa’s voting history in the UNHRC/HCR, where it differs from consensus, has been in concert with two blocs – former communist hegemons and their present allies (Eastern alliance) and the African Group. The former is composed of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Cuba, DPR Korea, Belarus, Myanmar and Venezuela.

Out of all the non-consensus motions South Africa voted in favour of, 89.6% were introduced by these countries. Of the human rights situations they either abstained from or voted against taking action in, 88.8% of these situations were caused by the same group of countries.

Most importantly, for all motions concerning human rights situations, South Africa votes unwaveringly for motions introduced by these two blocs. There are only six exceptions to this pattern of solidarity – all sponsored by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC, meaning that South Africa gives guaranteed support to these two blocs 99% of the time.

All the above-quoted figures were calculated by myself, from a public database of South Africa’s voting record in the UNHCR/HRC over the past 30 years, available here.

South Africa has often gone out of its way to protect friends and allies around the world, no matter how venal. In 2015, the ANC government gave shelter to Omar Bashir for the duration of the African Union Summit, despite Bashir being wanted for several crimes against humanity in his war on the people of Darfur, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape, as well as three counts of genocide.

The reasons for this are quite clear – the allegiance between the ANC and the communist countries in the Cold War, which coincided closely with the duration of National Party rule in South Africa, was particularly strong, as South Africa’s government was overtly tolerated by the United States and its allies until the late 1970s, and covertly supported (with certain accompanying pressures to reform) until the late 1980s.

The ANC is also a Pan-Africanist organisation, and sees Africa as a whole as existing in opposition to the West, a victim of imperialism both in colonial and neocolonial terms, and seeks to promote African interests against those of the West. Its allies on the continent are viewed through the lens of a common struggle, leading to often weaselly-sounding slogans like “quiet diplomacy” masking (not-so) covert solidarity.

Israel in particular is remembered by the ANC, not for their 1961 UNGA vote to sanction South Africa, but for their subsequently “embarrassingly good relations” in the following decades, which has earned a special place on the ANC’s blacklist, and has been part of the motivation for comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa.

In Zimbabwe, the ANC utterly refused to countenance any countermeasures or sanctions against Mugabe’s violent land grabs, rigged elections or ethnic cleansing of the Matabele. Under Thabo Mbeki’s stance of “quiet diplomacy”, there was no public censure. Mbeki opposed Zimbabwe’ removal from the Commonwealth of Nations, sidelined South African critics of Mugabe, refused to criticise vote rigging the 2002 and 2008 parliamentary elections, supported the land grabs as “necessary”, and gave salutary honours to Robert Mugabe on the occasion of his state funeral in 2019.

The best example of revealed preference here is that the ANC is not simply concerned with a pragmatic partisanship, but is enthusiastic in its support of partisan brutality. This is often expressed in private events which seldom reach public ears, but in a recent leaked speech by Ronnie Kasrils, the former intelligence chief praised the October 7th attacks on Israel as being “a brilliant, spectacular guerilla warfare attack. They swept in on them and they killed them and damn good. I was so pleased and people who support resistance applauded.”

But regardless of causes and justifications, South Africa’s lack of concern for human rights has nevertheless continued to surprise foreign observers, even after 30 years of consistently amoral partisanship.

Going South

There is little to say on the topic of South Africa’s demise that hasn’t already been stated in more detail and eloquence elsewhere, or by me on this blog in prior posts, but suffice it to say, every single aspect of governance is falling to pieces just like every other postcolonial disaster zone.

Our electricity supply was supposedly fixed at the end of last year (just in time for elections, haha), but it appears this was a very temporary fix, brought about by lifting some half-century coal plants out of mothball status, and feeding diesel into industrial generators. The intense faltering and blackouts, which were a minimum of six hours a day on a rotating local schedule before the quick fix, are now creeping back in.

Should they fail to produce another 20GW of power in the coming years, the system will likely fail. This will result in widespread violence and looting, much like the partisan campaign that kicked off in 2021, resulting in the weeks-long shutdown of the Durban-Johannesburg trading corridor, which accounts for over 60% of our internal trade.

We have among the worst and most expensive public education systems in the world, one of the highest murder and suicide rates, a massive problem with political assassination, and a vast system of political corruption held up by giant tome of race-based legislation and political interference.

The shape of this system is easy to understand though. It is part of the National Democratic Revolution, a race-based third-world adaptation of Lenin’s two-stage theory of revolution. Essentially, the first is a political revolution, in which the natives take over the state, and the second is a socialist revolution, where the ruling party takes over the economy and brings socialism to the masses.

However, the vast majority of their reforms are also unbudgeted, and money is constantly being squeezed from an increasingly anaemic private sector. The government cannot afford to support the 46% of the population who depend on social grants forever, but they cannot afford the fallout if they lose this patronage.

Many of our leading economists have agreed that we are heading for a fiscal cliff, as expenditure cannot be attenuated, but revenue is not increasing, and reforms are needed to liberate the economy. It is a gordian knot, to be sure.

Crucially, the neighbouring countries are also fully dependent on our economy for revenue, and depend on SA-destined trade for over a third of their national revenue.

If we fall, the entire subcontinent collapses.

The ANC’s death grip on the centre

The ANC, having been boxed in by the apartheid state, and the Anglo-American establishment, were forced to abandon the second phase, but agreed to postpone it for 25 years – they are keen observers of the balance of forces, and surprisingly realistic about them, considering their blasé attitude to every other aspect of reality. And right on schedule, Cyril Ramaphosa announced the second phase as he acquired the presidency in 2019.

There is a raft of legislation that has been floated out to engender this stage of national reform, which is in various stages of completion, due to two factors. One, the ANC are colossally incompetent. Two, they are still on the back foot in balance-of-forces terms. But the reforms are to be taken seriously.

There is the Expropriation Act and Land Courts Act (the latter of which is as yet unpromulgated – follow the link for a succinct explanation), which aims to empower the state to arbitrarily dispossess anybody of property with negligible legal notice (á la Zimbabwe), there is the National Health Insurance Bill, which aims to nationalise the healthcare industry and outlaw private insurance, the BELA Act, which will eradicate Afrikaans-language education from the public sector and destroy our remaining high-performing schools, and there is the District Development Model, a strangely overlooked piece of policy which aims to remove all independence from provincial and local government by enforcing central oversight in a manner similar to the Soviet and Chinese party commissar systems, but for infrastructure projects.

In the meantime, the party has asserted its control over the civil service, judiciary and private sector through two policies – Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), and Cadre Deployment. Under BEE, race quotas are mandatory in ownership, employment, management and procurement. Cadre deployment means that every position is preselected from party loyalists, including private company placements. My breast-pocket reference here is Exxaro Resources, a major coal supplier:

Several members of its board of directors are either an ANC member (Mvuleni Geoffrey Qhena, Geraldine J. Fraser-Moleketi, Vincent Zwelibanzi Mntambo), or directly related to an ANC member (Mxolisi Mgojo, son of ANC veteran Khoza Mgojo), while Andiswa Ndoni is a former member of the Judicial Selection Committee, and Isaac Malevu was also hired from within the IDC. Qhena in particular was chosen by the ANC to be placed in the position, which as the CEO of the state-owned Industrial Development Corporation, was a position he was well-placed to leverage.

This system extends to the top business leaders, including the Rothschilds’ main instrument in the country (remember, they funded the creation of the state through the war lobbying efforts of the Round Table Group over a century ago), B4SA, led by Martin Kingston, who is married into ANC royalty, and BUSA, a similar collection of big business entities closely meshed into ANC patronage networks through mandatory BEE share deals.

There are no alternative private-sector elites with any autonomy, except perhaps the slightly short-sighted Robert Hersov, whose political instincts have consistently been poorly-timed.

Electoral deadlock

The results of the recent election have been heralded across the world as a victory for the forces of democracy over corruption and decay. However, if the ANC and its splinter parties (PAC, EFF, ATM, MK), who are in fact much more radical than the main body of the ANC, have absorbed the broad swathe of electoral support lost by the ANC, and the three main ANC splinters have retained a near-2/3rds majority together.

Liberal and minoritarian parties have come and gone, and absorbed each other’s votes over time, but have not changed in their overall appeal, just as black nationalist parties have retained their static share of the electorate (see graphs below).

Negotiations in the current hung parliament have not yet been concluded, but barring an aberrant shift popular sentiment, the likelihood of a fundamental change in South Africa’s political makeup is unlikely. Liberal reforms would be painful and unpopular, and popular reforms would be dangerous to all.

While a coalition between the liberal DA and the ANC has been much celebrated, it has resulted in the exact reforms it was sold as preventing. A coalition with the EFF or MK is much feared, but it is unclear whether anything would change at the strategic level, except for a change in the patronage access for big business which is keeping the commanding heights of the economy loyal to the ANC.

When Zuma decided to swap out the Rothschilds, Ruperts and Oppenheimers for some Indian interlopers, the entire weight of the local and international community dove in to dislodge him. Yet nothing substantial changed, and if anything, Ramaphosa’s politics are more radical.

The DA, formerly an opposition party with a 130 year pedigree (despite various mergers and dissolutions in between), now a loyal coalition partner with limited desire to resist the ruling party, is stuffed with socialists. The previous strategy (2014-2019) of the party was to pick a black leader, pivot toward supporting the existing race laws, and try to gain black votes. Black voters saw this as a front, and only 4% of them have ever voted DA. Minorities vote Liberal (DA), black people vote black nationalist (ANC, MK, EFF).

But much of the DA’s left-wing crowd remains, including Ashor Sarupen, Dean McPherson, Andrew Whitfield, Siviwe Gwarube, and Geordin Hill-Lewis, who often boasts of how 75% of their local budget (mostly municipal rates from wealthier minorities) is allocated to poor black people. The minister of Home Affairs, for example, is much celebrated, but is a staunch supporter of the authoritarian leftists in Brazil, and has celebrated the decriminalisation of land invasions and illegal immigration.

Despite her public liberal credentials, Helen Zille is a staunch ally of George Soros, for whom she worked for 13 years, a fact she elides entirely from her autobiography. She got the party to set the UN SDGs as its manifesto, and supports the idea of every country being an identical, rootless multicultural state controlled by a global government. She despises Afrikaner nationalists, Cape independence, and Donald Trump, to the extent that she has shared conspiracy theories about him being Putin’s puppet and manipulating the outcome of the 2016 election. She has only opposed “woke” because it creates a right wing backlash.

John Steenhuisen is an ineffective figurehead who exists purely to placate minorities who were put off by Mmusi Maimane.

They are mostly keen on preserving their Parliamentary pensions, and make little effort to resist the ANC. They have expended a great deal of effort to contain not just Cape independence, but even moves toward provincial autonomy, by insisting only only taking on functions that are granted to them by the ANC.

Our constitution offers little outlet for local autonomy, and the powers of the various spheres are strictly curtailed by the constitution, making it federal in name only, and provides several explicit loopholes for compromising almost any civil right provided the judges are so inclined.

Consequently, nothing will change from the centre without the ANC’s say-so, and they are on track to regain their majority by 2029, according to polling experts at the Social Research Foundation and Victory Research.

The country votes according to race, and has done so for 30 years. The only way to change the system is to focus on the three powerhouse provinces (Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu Natal), which each have some form of separatist or local-devolutionist potential.

Looking West

So where does this leave us? We have the Cape, which has a widely-supported, but shallow separatist sentiment, KwaZulu Natal, which has a staunch tribal-nationalist character, effectively contained by the presence of Jacob Zuma, the only politician capable of bridging the Zulu nationalist and black-nationalist divide, and we have the Afrikaner nationalist movement, which has developed a significant degree of local self-governance capacity, enough to establish a parallel state.

The Western Cape is the most diverse economically and ethnically, and creates the most jobs. Current economic planning keeps focusing on construction, real estate, remote work and tourism, which is hollowing out manufacturing – a recipe for short-term success and long-term disaster.

The governing party (DA), for all their ills, is heavily pro-Western. I have covered their rebellious pro-Western foreign policy and their provincial trade- and aid-deals with the United States before.

The Cape independence movement managed to find nearly 2/3rds support in polling, but over 90% of supporters of secession insist on voting DA out of fear of the ANC. But with the party showing no spine in national government, support is visibly turning, leaving open the option for a small secessionist wedge from the conservative VF+ and the liberal RP and CIP to pressure them into holding a referendum.

Legal barriers are there, but at least constitutionally, the provincial Premier has the right to hold a referendum. The VF+ has a recent bill tabled for the provincial legislature, which will tick some key boxes in international treaties signed by the ANC in the 1990s affording autonomy to subnational peoples who claim it by declaring the people of the Western Cape to be a people in our own right.

The DA has postponed this bill, and pushed their own version, which merely asks permission from the ANC to give them a few more competencies, a cynical containment move.

But with their support utterly cratering over their capitulation to the ANC, the independence movement now has a window to seize. Preparations are being made as funders have suddenly become interested, and an umbrella organisation will coordinate funding for the three parties (possibly four, depending on current negotiations) that make up the movement.

The Zulus are under pressure from the national government to reform the holdings of the King, whose royal trust holds territory the size of Wales. Expropriation is a threat to the continuation of their traditional life, and they have consequently struck an allegiance with the Afrikaner nationalist movement.

Their votes are split between the Zulu-nationalist IFP and the fragile black-nationalist, yet Zulu dominant MK party, who together hold 63% of the vote. Should the MK party collapse (likely, given Jacob Zuma’s advanced age), the Zulu nationalists stand a chance to gain an outright majority.

The Afrikaners have demonstrated the capacity for self-governance at a small scale, through Orania, which survives on almost no capital injection, and is growing at over 10% every year, with above replacement fertility rate.

The rest of the white population relies to a fairly great extent on the efforts of the movement, which includes farm watches, that have halve the mortality of farm murders, and done a great deal to replace deficits in urban security, firefighting, infrastructure repair, and even work placement and training, through jobs networks and private education initiatives.

Their collective membership overall runs to over 570 000, representing the majority of Afrikaner households.

They have the capacity, should other minoritarian parties assent, to partition the Tshwane municipality, and gain administrative autonomy for the Afrikaner majority city of Pretoria. Municipalities have in the past been partitioned for explicitly ethnic reasons (the Collins Chabane municipality in Limpopo), and the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act makes it necessary for the Municipal Demoarcation Board to afford equal treatment should they or the nativist (anti-immigrant) movements in Soweto desire separate governance for their communities.

This would allow Johannesburg and Pretoria to be governed by minoritarian/liberal administrations which can assure the economic hub a greater degree of certainty and security, in a similar fashion to Cape Town. At a stretch, this could apply even to Bloemfontein.

Coupling this with targeted leveraging of the 2022 Constitutional Court ruling that BEE is unenforceable in local procurement (thanks to Sakeliga), and the VF+’s “CUP” plan (substituting local services with communitylevel self-governance), whole territories can be brought under community control.

This could establish a chain of Afrikaner-run trading nodes across the subcontinent, re-establishing vital economic security, which the Solidariteit Movement has called “anchor towns”.

But for all these efforts, finance and organisation would be necessary. Fortunately, South Africa is a cheap round, and a few million Rand for each campaign would likely clinch it, if they were effectively targeted.

Kyk Noord

For the United States, which is the only real arbiter of international recognition when push comes to shove (except for, as time progresses, China) there is only one serious option for preserving their interests in South Africa in the long term – to endorse Cape independence.

It may seem a tad self-serving for me to make this argument, and it is. But for anyone paying attention to the nature of coalition politics in South Africa will note that the efforts so far to secure Liberal control over the various metropoles has failed everywhere outside the Cape.

Not only have these efforts failed, but support for the DA has been shown to decline after coalition government has been achieved in various metropolitan governments. This has largely been the result of instability in these coalitions caused by small parties exploiting the weakness and slim margins of support to leverage gains for their vested interests, resulting in constant floor-crossings and shifts in government control.

This instability and political deadlock, and the resulting looting that occurs in these moments of insecurity have meant that the dramatic decline of governance in the national interior has been uninterrupted.

This resistance has involved sabotage, fraud, refusal to abide by electoral decisions, and widespread ruling-party directed protests and vandalism of public infrastructure. And that it is working to some degree is hardly surprising. The ruling party achieved its position as the sole representative of the black liberation movement through terror, bloodshed, and above all, making the country ungovernable. Their strategy in the Cape since 2011 has been deliberate and systematic collusion with the gangs to push up homicide figures and capture votes through intimidation.

If I were an ambitious master of American foreign policy, I would not stop at the Cape. The final aim of a power aiming to keep the free trade of essential global commodities stable would be to capture South Africa. But to do that would require encircling the old territories of the Boer republics once again.

The ports were once a threat to the maintenance of the customs union established between the colonies and republics under British control between 1902 and 1910 – competition between mining interests on the Rand were pitted in a truel between the port tariff regimes of the Cape and Natal, and when the tension became high, shunted their gold out of Maputo, much to British consternation, resulting in the Act of Union to contain centrifugal forces.

To cripple the ANC, and socialist black nationalism in general, one would need to capture three ports – Cape Town, Durban, and Maputo – and squeezing Pretoria until it agrees to play ball.

This should not be hard – Mozambique has been receiving an increasing portion of our exports through Maputo as Durban fails to carry the weight, as has Namibia for Cape Town. They are also facing a local insurgency which is only failing because of its reliance on local African peacekeeping forces, the most effective of which remains Rwanda.

Carving off KZN and the Western Cape would take four years, and securing Maputo would take even less time. The US could easily surround the Rand, and there would be no way for the mining belt to secure strategic deals in favour of China or India without America’s say-so. Our ports are declining, and are rated the least efficient in the world, already resulting in the shift to exports through Maputo in neighbouring Mozambique, a trend which has nearly tripled in volume since 2016:

However, reliance on Durban, Richard’s Bay, Cape Town and the Sishen-Saldanha line still occupy an enormous slice of our exports. Coega/Ngqura simply cannot replace this volume.

Cape independence only needs a handshake from across the Atlantic to launch. Maputo would be relatively easy – after all, it is governed by Mozambique, who currently rely on the West for the stabilisation of the Islamist rebellion in Cabo Delgado.

To push the Zulus toward independence would not require a great deal of effort, if one were willing to stomach the cost. The ANC would exert a great deal of violence, though they do not have the funding to sustain it, and the party and state security forces are vastly outnumbered by local private security, who are far more competent. It is unlikely to run along the lines of the old People’s War, but more along the lines of the 2021 riots, which, while deadly and chaotic, shutting down half the country and threatening uprising, were quickly subdued, predominantly by volunteer militia from minorities and the middle class.

Cape independence is a real possibility, and an easy way to keep a small island of Western influence over the southern high seas, and for those of us living here, our only chance at liberty and prosperity.

It would be foolish of the West not to support it.

As for whom to talk to, a vehicle is being prepared to coordinate the movement. Updates will be provided to those who need it, be emailing me at rob.duigan@btinternet.com