weekly newspaper.
An increasingly rare species is slipping further from public view: the lesser spotted public servant. When the provincial capital was cauterised from the IFP’s Zululand heartland in Ulundi, the ANC promised a boom for the once sleepy hollow of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal. And it delivered.
Armies of officials drove up rentals and property prices. The fried and flame-grilled chicken economy had feathers flying. Driving this past week through Langalibalele Street at 4pm, one had the distinct impression that the city’s eyes have become droopy again. Where there were once throngs of SUVs generously funded by government subsistence and travel allowances, there is the ease of a platteland dorpie. No one is more disturbed than the cashier at the chicken joint close to the equally desolate petrol station.
weekly newspaper.
I thought 23 weeks of long Covid-19, my dad dying and having a son all in quick succession in 2020 was bad, and then 2021 arrived to bite me in the ass with an immune system that is still suffering the consequences of a version of Covid-19 that’s yet to be explained. Our kid went to daycare and has become a walking, talking bacterial infection, I had to submit a new manuscript for a book for which I have yet to receive feedback (the fact that I am quite happy with the work I produced and quite proud of it makes the wait weightier and more anxiety-inducing), we just wrapped up another season of Don’t Shoot the Messenger and while podcast production and storytelling is a passion, passions are not for the faint of heart, and I took some time out the other day to count how many days this year I have been healthy, consecutively. That number, my friends, is 21 – slightly less than, actually.
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
Simon Sinek’s book Leaders Eat Last is a take on learnings from the US military and how the role of any leader is to make their team feel safe and inspire them to feel fulfilled and grateful in their work. Caring for people, over caring for numbers, has become a luxury in the workplace and Sinek laments the fact that there is demand for his insights into trust, empathy and leadership.
This week I came across another of his fine musings, this time about the role of the CEO and how organisations often pick the wrong people for the job, mostly because the job description is vague and poorly defined.
weekly newspaper.
It would not be presumptuous for one to assume that whatever argument Jacob Zuma’s legal team presents to the Pietermaritzburg high court – for the state prosecutor Billy Downer to recuse himself – will eventually fail.
The former president returns to court, for his fraud and corruption trial, on 26 May, when the application for Downer to be removed from the case will be heard.
Strangely, the news of the pending application has been known for a while. One would have expected that by the time Zuma appeared in court for the start of his trial on 17 May, the affidavit – stating the alleged case against Downer – would have been ready. That was not to be, lending credence to the widely held belief that this is another one of Zuma’s tactics to delay his trial indefinitely. Surely if Zuma had evidence of nothing short of misconduct on Downer’s part, he would have gleefully handed it over to the court already?
No serious conversation can be had about South Africa’s Constitution if it is divorced from the history of how it came to be, the process through which it was drafted, and by whom. By avoiding history, we are avoiding complexity and by avoiding complexity we are avoiding reality.