November began with Zuma’s parliamentary soft-shoe shuffle and progressed through Shrien Dewani ‘s brief dance with his wife to the announcement that South Africa’s newly developed education system will quick-step off the stage without missing so much as a beat.
Although we’re fast entering the silly season, so named due to a historical dearth of hard news while we all put family first and some of us include God and Jesus in our festivities, the country is hardly easing into it gently, with somewhat shocking revelations at every turn.
What implications are there for business, for our private lives and our future?
The cabinet reshuffle has probably come too late to provide miracles before the next local or even national elections. When Tokyo Sexwale re-entered politics I hoped his spree in the private sector would allow him to cut the crap, but it took him over a year to proclaim what we all already knew, that municipalities can’t afford to install service infrastructure at the rate he requires it.
Dewani’s devilish honeymoon left us in no doubt that he has single-handedly completely obliterated the warm, fuzzy contentment the world felt about us in the aftermath of the World Cup; the joie de vivre evaporated overnight.
He is now considered the alleged brain behind the entire incident and it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to extradite him as long as we do. Being gay is a lame excuse to marry, murder and flee the scene of the crime. There are worse things than ‘gay’. Having a son who is a murderer must be far, far worse.
The man the British press is treating like a proper English gentleman will ‘get his’ the moment he enters a South African jail if, in fact, he does...
His fellow prisoners would be lining up to meet and greet him!
And it’s all very well when I run our cops down, but what earthly right do these damned foreigners have to follow suit? Finding this tiny well of patriotism deep within my soul has been a surprise. I was initially horrified that South Africa failed to run out the usual trite phrases of compassion, but I now realise that something must have stunk from the get-go.
Of his alleged arrogant disclosure to his accomplices that he’d done this before, I immediately thought: ‘Ha! Brett Kebble.’ But that would be stretching the imagination too far, and it seems the cops are even on to that. Impressive!
WikiLeaks has provided a storm of note and I suspect should be considered closely. In comparing its purpose to our Public Information Bill and media tribunal fracas I was forced to accept that there is some disparity between what I need to know and what government believes it needs to keep secret, but that we both have a point.
Frankly, I could be happy without the revelations about the president’s sex life. The USA survived JFK’s more discreet extra-marital affairs. If Zuma’s entourage believes this makes him a real man, good luck to them.
But I do feel entitled to know where every last cent goes and frankly, I believe I have the right to vote on it, slag off bad spending habits and ridicule those who don’t keep their accounts in order. Fraudsters, in my opinion, should go directly to prison without passing ‘Go’. Oh, and stay there until their sentence is up!
The money the state spends is yours and mine, even if our share of the common purse only accumulates from VAT as our Minister of Health so kindly reminded us in defence of the NHI.
More about my share: SARS took it upon itself to audit me a couple of weeks ago.
When I freelanced in Gauteng pre-1997 I was audited every year. I’d receive a form requesting evidence of a different area of spending each year, (a clever way of keeping tax-payers honest). I’d slip it out of the relevant file, drive down to the Rec of Rev where someone would fetch my return, compare them and send me home. An hour of my time – tops.
This year’s request was totally different. I was expected to supply everything from bank statements to Visa card statements (what price FICA?) and all those ridiculous medical levy receipts that the pharmacy prints out. I had to account for almost every cent I’d paid my gardener and domestic worker, plus the cash payments made to workers and labourers during a home improvement project (excuse me). Most of these either don’t invoice me or give no contact details.
As a freelancer, I gave three days up to the exercise, thereby diluting my earnings for the month. I also paid my son (my brief affair with nepotism) to help tack together innumerable documents and cash slips for the Receiver’s edification, mark items A-Z, AA-ZZ, AAA-ZZZ and so forth, until he finally scanned them all and I sent them off.
An audit via e-filing is a laugh a minute. I don’t recommend it. But in lieu of a permanent book-keeper (I have an accounting diploma and so am theoretically capable of doing my own addition) to sit at the SARS offices for several days, this is now the only option, I was assured. I think SARS auditors should come to their business of choice, go through the files on-site and learn to count.
I’d even provide the odd cup of tea.
The bad news is that unemployment is still rising. During 2009, the country lost nearly a million jobs and we still have not managed to recoup any. This November’s figures show an annual decline of 2.4% against last year’s, Adcorp says, with job losses most significant in the manufacturing and financial sectors.
And instead of putting our own graduates to work, we’re importing Cubans to fill positions. Would they be considered affirmative-action posts?
Ebrahim Patel’s New Growth Path reads a bit like a new communist manifesto and has not received much acclaim from business, Cosatu or even Cabinet. I’m convinced that the state has no right to suggest private enterprise caps its salaries, particularly not before hammering down hard on its own.
The moral: if it is working, leave it be and attend to things that aren’t.
The state and its enterprises operate in a vacuum, doing their planning behind closed doors that are only thrown open for a brief period before policies are finalised.
Eskom is a prime example: plans set in stone which could not attract investment were hastily revised to take advantage of available green infrastructure investment. But why did Eskom not know of this before it hit the media? I can’t place when last innovation emerged from government’s hallowed halls. Possibly not since that chap invented the interlocking concrete blocks that litter our harbours.
Busa claims we need 15 years of 9% year-on-year growth to fulfil Patel’s pipe dream of five million new jobs by 2020. Having created the jobs, we would then need qualified people to fill them. In fact, Busa estimates that if the present growth rate of 3% continues, most of those of working age will be out of work by 2025; which makes me wonder who will have a job other than the politicians.
Since our bureaucracy at all levels leaves much to be desired, Busa called on the state to perfect delivery before trying its hand at development. This would mean ending buddy-system deployment and building a culture of professionalism in our civil service, from whence could hopefully grow pride. Oh my, we are such a long way from that.
On-the-job training would serve a dual purpose, making SETAs redundant and giving youngsters the chance to earn low salaries but gain experience. This would give the brightest the chance to overcome their poor education, overtake their elders and create some competition in the marketplace. I’m keen!
Scholars should never be hampered by bad teachers. When did you last meet one with a true vocation? Text books are essential for those who are prepared to research, read and learn more than inadequate teachers can put across (they define syllabus). And there are kids across the board keen to do the extra.
Those are the ones who should receive subsidised education where necessary. Others less gifted would learn that tertiary education was never designed for everyone. There is absolutely no shame in becoming a plumber or electrician, for instance and with our growing population neither of those are likely to become obsolete.
Busa believes that more investment in the informal sector and SMEs would improve innovation and could provide 80% of the jobs needed to replace the ones we’ve lost. Here’s a thing: Nissan South Africa is looking for automotive incentives to bring its Leaf electric vehicle to SA by 2012. All well and good, but no low-fuel-emission vehicle can make up for the fact that the bulk of our power comes from burning fossil fuel, defeating the purpose.
Studio M’s bottom line: Having survived another year, please take special care during the summer holiday season; on our roads, at beaches, lakes and at all holiday destinations. Watch your kids! We don’t all live charmed lives. Charm is what loved ones bring into them. May this Christmas and New Year give you that and pause for reflection about what’s really important.
Mo November 2010
It seems the only strategy that works with some of government’s more fantastical ideas is to feign partial agreement (as with the media tribunal discussions) to debate already belaboured points. Does government merely want more opportunities to talk in order to avoid getting its work done? So let’s begin and by so doing, deflect it from mines and land reform, where its successes are already notably limited.
Why not experiment with nationalisation?
It’s the new national 15-letter dirty word and we all understand why. The ANCYL is bent on nationalising mines because it is sure that government will be able to tap the South African earth’s riches and provide for all our people. Well, at least for all those well-connected politically.
It believes the same of agriculture, hence land reform.
What the YL appears to miss is the need for extremely hard work, a canny sense of adventure and considerable investment in both spheres.
I do sympathise with would-be farmers who believe they need funding to make their plots prosper; there is little worse than finding oneself short of cash to do essential improvements (like buy seed and replace aging machinery) once the land becomes yours; wrapped in pretty paper and tied with a bow, like a birthday gift.
Courage Guys! Take heart!
Think back over our country’s history (at least those bits that we were force-fed at school during the apartheid era).
There were these groups of hardened anti-social farmers who wanted nothing more than to escape the rule of law and be left alone to prosper. For want of something better, let’s call them Afrikaners...
These men and their families trekked into the unknown over hill (well, mountains) and dale (more like chasms) to find land where they could pursue their own lives, rather like those supposedly misguided chaps who more recently founded Oranje.
Let’s get real! This type of person exists in every society; we are not all city slickers. The Amish in America have similar thought processes. Anyway, after unbelievably tortuous journeys, our chaps found large pieces of unoccupied land they chose to call home and set about turning them into farms.
Please note: no government funding, no bank loans and no new or aging machinery.
They prospered by dint of hard manual labour.
And as for the mining industry...where did it begin?
Several silly old individuals with little to do with their time recognised glitters that were gold and flashes that spoke volumes (of British pounds). Neither were new. They had been lying there for the taking for centuries spurned by those who trod this hallowed ground before the Brits set foot there (I’m limiting my thinking here to Barnato and Rhodes).
Our first miners were enterprising. Many were also fools.
My own grandfather was quite determined he would find diamonds on a farm called Rietkuil, near Lichtenburg and arranged prospecting rights with the farm’s owner and the Chamber of Mines. The cost of prospecting fell on him. On his first day as a professional prospector a diamond was found. The 165-carat stone was sold for £2 400.00 in Johannesburg.
Grandfather Cecil was elated. He hot-footed it back to Rietkuil determined to make his fortune. Sadly, he didn’t, although he impoverished himself and his family trying. This was in the mid-1920s. In about 1982 another diamond of 105 carats was found at Rietkuil and the place thereafter became the largest digging in the area. It has produced more than 88 000 carats worth at the time, over R6 million.
Good instincts, bad luck, Gramps! (And so say all his descendants!)
Cecil was one of many who rushed to mine and left disheartened and penniless, having learnt that not all that glitters is gold and little that doesn’t sparkle cleans up nicely. These men were perhaps not the first poor whites, but were definitely some of South Africa’s early ones. Our Cecil, on the other hand, was an inveterate gambler and his scheming didn’t stop at diamonds, so to some small degree he managed to climb out of his prospecting hole.
But having explained why I don’t think that mines and agriculture will necessarily prosper under AA and BBEEE, or what passes for either at Aurora, where would the ANC best look to nationalise?
Many state-owned companies don’t thrive, partly because the state believes that as the owner, it has the right to draw off free services and products. Accounting 101 teaches that owner drawings can bankrupt any business and millions are owed to organisations like the SABC and Eskom by their major shareholder, be it by the national, provincial or local arms.
Sentech recently cut its services to several government clients that had not paid amounts owing and I applaud Quraysh Patel, who was running Sentech at the time, for having the sheer guts and determination to follow up these cases as he would any other defaulting customer.
Frankly, there are state-owned ventures about which we hear never a word.
They are the ones that only supply their shareholder, although not always exclusively. The government printer is one. He churns out weekly gazettes and other basic printing with monotonous regularity.
So I suggest government looks very closely at the products on which it already spends an absolute fortune of taxpayer money, buys up a single struggling business in each of those sectors and supplies itself exclusively. It can’t fail to make a bundle each time and could make every tax-payer rand do double-duty.
Companies in the fabric and clothing industry, for instance, are suffering dreadfully from the Chinese influence, which government seems little inclined to curb. I’d guess that government departments could be the biggest buyers of promotional T-shirts countrywide?
Once again, don’t limit your imagination to the hundreds of national promotional launches it rolls out every year. Include municipality uniforms and provincial launches (for every one national there are probably nine provincial) and don’t forget the number of ANC and ANCYL T-shirts it takes to win an election...
If it bought and turned one failed fabric manufacturer over to T-shirting manufacture, a struggling clothing manufacturer over to T-shirt manufacture and a third desperate business to promotional fabric printing, government would have killed four birds with one stone; as long as the three companies supply only government, very little room for fraud and corruption would exist.
Why, you ask? You see, there’s very little point in one government employee bribing another. Don’t we all know that they are so heavily indebted that unless the debt can be garnisheed, it isn’t likely to be repaid?
Ever.
All Government really needs is to identify those sectors which benefit unduly from government business. And that’s easily done in general discussion around a table.
The lavatory sector is one of them.
I know this from experience. When working in a government department, we once sent out an urgent plea over the intranet that some toilet paper be left in the lavatories each afternoon for the use of those few who worked overtime. It didn’t work; those who were zapping the rolls from the holders by 15h00 every afternoon did not have access to e-mail.
But add to that all those public facilities local governments or municipalities manage, there surely has to be big money in the country’s kak. I mean that quite literally, although it certainly works just as well if used figuratively, doesn’t it?
Condoms, of course, are another. But don’t be tempted to suppose that soap is bought as often; it is seldom supplied in government entities and public facilities. Neither are towels.
And of course, government employees are required to buy their own tea and coffee or contribute to a monthly tea club...so government’s not likely to corner the beverage market in a hurry.
But failed caterers would be another brilliant sector to invest in; one in every major centre for all those state events that feed the starving millions. As would tourism...I take it we do all know that the only thing that keeps SAA in the air is government business? Hotels too, complain during election weeks of being empty because government travel stops and surely there are a few of those that have failed to recoup their pre-WC investment and could go belly up without a few hefty government bellies on their beds and in their restaurants?
In this game, it’s really only a matter of using your imagination rather than doing hard, manual labour. And just think how willing unproductive employees (whose jobs would have been salvaged) would be to vote for the ANC next time around, just before they go out on strike again.
Studio M’s bottom line: It would doubtless surprise you to know that I really do wish I could slag another organisation for bad business sense for a change. Government unfortunately, simply presents such tempting targets. Any country’s government probably does, but my vote this week goes to the Brits who have announced that they plan to get to the bottom of South Africa’s arms deal. Oh, please Mr Brown, do flush out all the smelly details; we’d all like to know where that particular billion went...
Mo October 2010
I was a teenager before I fully realised the extent of the trauma my parents suffered during WWII.
They were initially based in the UK during the war. Everything from the devastation of the countryside, towns and cities, the loss of countless close friends, relations and, in my father’s case, fellow fighter-pilots, plus the fear that the other would be killed, left their mark.
The ongoing, dreary rationing, must also have contributed to daily depression and despair and my mother often mentioned that the country’s milk was still rationed when I came along in 1951. (Post-war, a bottle of milk was given to every school child every day, though. At least British adults understood the reason.)
While my father trained Canadian pilots on their home turf, my mother coped with several miscarriages without any support.
They suffered a fate no worse than many others, I agree and they were lucky to come out of the war alive, their immediate family of three intact. But it does say much about why so many parents of that era seemed so cold, distant and basically unloving. They were hardened by adversity.
After she was eventually able to join my father in SA and had met her in-laws, my mother believed their war here, was essentially not very difficult. Her Johannesburg sisters-in-law did a lot of entertaining and dancing for the war effort, despite being married to soldiers who were up north.
In short, my mother disapproved.
When I was introduced to Nevil Shute’s books I would wonder whether South Africans would pull together as marvellously and patriotically as the Brits, the French and even the Germans did, were bombs, blackouts and shortages thrust upon us.
In my most optimistic moments, I felt that adversity brings out the best in us, that we could do it if we ever had to. Now, I’m not so sure. I have many more pessimistic moments.
My personal conspiracy theory?
The country is still suffering from the recession and there really are not enough signs that those who are able are doing the sort of things that would make others who are less able, more comfortable. I’m not talking about individuals, but organisations, companies and especially the state.
In fact, I dare to suggest that there is a third force at work in this country and it goes by the name of ‘greed’.
The jobless and poverty stricken are still backed against an unyielding wall, only its thickness and height have changed. As they sink lower into the morass, so it will take them longer to climb out.
For business: even though it is harder to turn a profit, deciding the absolute amount of profit you really need, must factor into the equation…
Late last week, Brian Kahn, senior deputy research head of the reserve bank, told parliament’s standing committee on finance that food prices are now on the way down and are actually helping to lower average inflation.
They are unlikely to stay down in the long term.
I am convinced that companies with products to sell could be doing way more to speed the process up. While I understand that again rising fuel prices influence the end cost of everything except fresh air (which these days is virtually unobtainable) some companies are having a field day.
We’ve had plenty of price-fixing episodes, with bread prices among them, but producers are raising their costs with nice-to-haves that could easily wait for the next boom.
Some time ago, I noticed that my washing powder packaging had changed. Unfortunately, the closest competitor is produced by the same company, and their packaging changed simultaneously and similarly from a sturdy box to a flimsy foil packet that absolutely refuses to stand erect on any shelf I possess. It spills unless wedged tightly.
There is also no way to keep the new packet sealed, once open, bar using a laundry clothes peg; now that’s third-world thinking! The designs on both brands had been revised. The consumer watchdog in me (normally too lazy to further a gripe past conversation with friends) growled and I contacted the brand manager to ask why the change had been made.
She assured, patronisingly, that research showed that customers prefer the new packaging which had been designed particularly to ensure that the soap powder did not lose its pleasant perfume.
That’s rich!
I should imagine that the bulk of consumers who own automatic front loaders (the type of washing powder we were discussing) can also afford to buy softener. You know that milky liquid with an all-pervasive scent that makes clothes easier to iron and, according to the advertising, separates all the fibres and makes little boys feel secure while away from their mums.
It also smells so strongly that any washing-powder perfume (which I have never noticed) definitely goes down the drain before the final rinse!
I gave up and bought an airtight container, irritated at the need to decant my washing powder.
Then I found that the dog pellets and biscuits my little darlings most prefer, are now being sold in new plastic packets half the size of the old boxes, but at an inflated price.
Package design is not what is presently influencing low in-store sales. Lack of ready consumer cash is! So why would companies which are claiming hard times along with the rest of us, be changing their packaging at additional dilution of profits?
The only people standing to gain from the exercise are those dinky little package-design companies and their printers…
To add insult to injury, my son pointed out that the plastic bags used to package our bread have undergone a change, with an extra layer of colour between consumer and product freshness, to hide the product almost completely. That’s a lot of printers’ ink, which comes at a cost, particularly if it’s lead-free.
Bread: one product that, no matter how broke people actually are, they are likely to continue buying.
I pointed out that there was much more packet at the end of the loaf than there used to be and I’d still take a bet that loaves have shrunk considerably in size since Jesus did his party trick with the loaves and fishes.
In fact, I know exactly how many slices we used to get from a pre-sliced loaf and how few we get now. That’s because I have always made school and work sandwiches for the week, in one marathon, Sunday spreading session, then frozen the lot for daily defrosting and consumption.
Why is the Competition Commission so busy these days? Every industry seems to have its defaulters in the honour game. Every sector is clamouring to keep prices as high as possible. And bread was recently at the top of the list!
After the recent mobile-phone fiasco, I still have questions. How is it that a fourth mobile-phone provider can offer rock-bottom prices, when the big players are still refusing to divulge their balance sheets?
How is it possible that Telkom, which charges excessive landline to mobile interconnection rates, was not also required to bring its rates down?
Why am I still paying extraordinary download costs, when new cables now lie at the bottom of the ocean? Other countries, yes, even African countries, have managed to connect and drop their prices. Why not ours?
And why are we only promised a miniscule drop annually. As my son says, we’ll probably simply be offered more Gigs per package, with no drop in prices…
The last of my shining examples must be Eskom, which thinks it can pull the wool over all our eyes all of the time.
In case you missed this little gem from Sapa late last week, economist Mike Schussler warned that South Africans will end up with the most expensive electricity in the world, rising from its present place in the priciest 33%.
Eskom’s personnel costs, he said, rose 33.6% in one year, way above any salary increases demanded by labour unions. To curb the secondary effects of the increase on inflation, interest rates could rise up to 2% and economic growth would be 1.1% lower, coming in at only an average 1.6% over five years.
In fact, Schussler came right out and stated with authority, what the rest of us have not bothered to research properly, but still believe:
SA needs better regulation and better regulators!
Studio M’s bottom line: If we don’t speak out now, it won’t be long before we’re again all living on credit or, where credit is not available, starving in abject poverty.
Mo September 2010
Does your organisation or business have soul? Or is it really all just about money? And why would soul even matter?
Let’s face facts, work-wise, we’re all here to make our daily bread and that’s important. But when the bottom line is all that matters, you’d be amazed how demoralising it can be for the people working there.
And if you don’t believe me, think back to some of the strike scenes we’ve been treated to recently on TV... heard said and read about.
When one striker told a news reporter government should borrow money from Zimbabwe, xenophobic attacks finally fell into place for me: we lent that country money but still host roughly 25% of its population. Perhaps some feel it’s time that Zim returns a favour.
No wonder our people are getting vicious! Even though we believe they should know better. After all, how much is really in the hands of the people?
But when hospital workers picketing outside their place of work remove their clothing in public and dance virtually in the nick, you cannot honestly believe they’ve even a drop of self-respect left, surely?
Do people come more demoralised than that?
Or do we just assume they find joy in strange ways?
Most of you have a pretty good idea of how I perceive strikes and I really don’t want to be judgemental. My career has mainly existed without the comfort of a union backstop and that way, you learn quickly that what doesn’t go into your letter of appointment is unlikely ever to happen.
Want a salary review after three months or an annual increase? Talk fast or you might not sniff even an extra cent for several years.
Because once whatever organisation has you under its thumb, it is unlikely to be more generous than absolutely necessary, especially during these sort of ‘it’s over but not over’ recessionary times...or if it finds itself hopelessly drowning in debt.
Public servants obviously also have to consider the fact that, as individuals, the terms are seldom theirs.
Salaries are set out in a ‘core’ book about the size of a small encyclopaedia; everyone’s entitled to browse through it to find out exactly what the lazy SOB in the chief director’s office is earning, what subsidised vehicle he’s entitled to buy, which hotels he’s allowed to book into and which make and model he’s entitled to rent at the airport after his business-class flight to get maximum value from that hotel’s valet parking.
In fact, a few months ago I would loosely have supposed that not much about the public service can really be kept secret; not for long, anyway. Word gets out and you really can’t imagine the variety of the whispers in the corridors of power until you’ve heard them yourself! At least they make the morning tea break a big wake-up call...
And doubtless that’s why the Protection of Information Bill has reared its ugly head. Politicians are really just sick and tired of having their dirty linen washed in public. They haven’t yet worked out that the only way round that is to keep it squeaky clean all the time...unworn, pure and chaste.
Ag shame!
What I believe some public servants are worth is simply not pertinent; I’m quite sure Zuma would pay all he could to win their vote again and it will be really sad for him if one of the services that bites the dust includes the food packages he was planning to hand out to the really, really poor come next year’s local elections.
Suffice it to say that I believe that too many public servants are sitting in entry level jobs from where they should long since have progressed to better ones. It’s no small wonder their salaries don’t cover the needs of the large families that have morphed around them during 20 years’ service.
I read (http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/readerblog/2010/08/27/the-strike-at-helen-joseph-hospital/) that most of the hospital strikers are not emergency-service workers: many doctors and nursing staff are still on duty, while the non-emergency cleaners, cooks and launderers make up the larger proportion of those toyi-toyiing outside in the spring sunshine.
These people need self-development and ambition. They need to get out more and apply for jobs that naturally command higher salaries, leaving entry-level positions vacant for entry-level prospects to fill.
Because when all is said and done and a percentage is finally agreed, it’s all relative.
My charwoman works four days a week, only one of those for me. Her husband has no job. Her daughter has AIDS, no job and is living with her. The daughter’s daughter also lives with them and her son has been branded ultra-bright; she has been urged to allow him to finish school, although what possible chance he’d have of getting a job anyway were he to try that avenue, is questionable.
I’d guess Sarah earns roughly R1 600/month.
But she tells me that the striking public servants insist that they are worth so much more than they are being paid because they are educated. Sarah reads and writes, but wouldn’t call herself an intellectual or academic.
Have I got news for those public servants!
Since when does it take an education to mop a hospital floor, to prepare hospital meals or to wash bed linen? Since when could that sort of job not be adequately filled by someone like Sarah, who could keep her family in clover on that sort of income?
Don’t get me wrong. I can empathise with anyone who views his wealthy boss with a jaundiced yellow-green stare. Haven’t we all, at some stage, been there? I also know the resentment of doing myself all the work that my so-called superior is not capable of getting right.
But the striking public workforce should also realise that, compared to millions of Sarahs all over the country, it’s doing really well! The disparity between Sarah’s take-home pay and theirs is ample cause for her to protest publically. Especially since she has far more couth than to strip nearly poedelnakend (wonderful word) in public and comport herself in what is, in my culture, an unseemly manner.
When the strikers use the disparity between MP wages and their own as reason for their disillusion, they should perhaps take into account the disparity between their own income and those who have far less or nothing. Or admit that the occasional one of those MPs could just be a little better educated than they.
Sadly, if you can get to the top with a Standard 3 or despite failing woodwork, why wouldn’t all of them aspire to be there?
We talk about the need for strong leadership, but forget that leading takes more than exhorting employees; it means helping them learn how to devise strategies and how to manage projects, no matter how simple those projects are. It means giving your organisation some soul and making people proud to belong there. It means giving them reason to take pride in all they do no matter the salary they earn.
But most importantly, it means giving them the self-respect and ambition to move on to more responsible positions in other organisations and better themselves once they’ve reached the ceiling you can offer.
Unfortunately, I believe the ruling ANC poured all its soul into the World Cup. That it also made sure it was also first at the trough, was even less fortunate. Now that a pinch more soul might help, it is bankrupt in more ways than one and the only person having sleepless nights is Pravin Gordhan, who somehow just doesn’t look the type to wield a big stick.
Bet he wishes sometimes at night he was in Seattle rather than in Pretoria...
Whether our ANC MPs are driving through the night from Cape Town to Pretoria when they could just as easily fly, or are breaking their trips halfway at a five-star establishment, they don’t seem to have enough soul to save any souls but their own.
And that’s what I mean when I say it’s all relative.
Studio M’s bottom line: Any organisation that exists only to make money is a business without a soul; real service, quality of purpose and general fulfilment cannot be ignored. And make no mistake, our government’s big business and it is ignoring both its electorate and its workforce.
Mo August 2010
I must hand it to my mother: she did all she could to change me from an introspective loner into a social butterfly.
She was very jolly hockey sticks and automatically assumed sport would also save my grace.
Wrong!
Although I loved the odd dip on hot days, I was unimpressed by daily swimming training. I have to be about the least competitive of God’s creations and I found ploughing a furrow up and down a pool a distinctly monotonous way of achieving absolutely nothing.So I was included in her tennis classes for teenage girls; she dragged me along, stuck a racquet in my hand and said, ‘Play!’ I was nine years old.
I will always remember her telling me that if I didn’t get the next ball ‘in’ I could go and sit in the car.I hit that ball harder than I knew I could and watched with pride as it for once cleared the net, soared past her and pinged resoundingly against the court’s back fence.
Locked inside the car for the rest of the afternoon, I had the time to consider that I really had no clue of where ‘in’ was. I’m pretty sure my mother thought I had concocted a dastardly devious plot to humiliate her in public.Amazing how minds work, especially when communication’s lacking.
I was demoted to school pre-tennis classes where we used oversized table-tennis bats with short handles, instead of racquets. Yet I was still booked into every holiday tennis clinic my mother could afford after scrounging from the housekeeping, until I graduated to playing stingers against a tennis wall with other, mainly male rebels, for most of each day.
Not quite what she’d planned for the young lady in her dreams. Then came Guiding; I became a Brownie and P-O-W--W-O-Wed in an earnest sort of way; reduced to a world of fairies, elves and sprites at a time when my fantasies were all about Sherlock Holmes and The Scarlet Pimpernel.
My mother became Brown Owl to a neighbouring pack and any joy that carrying a clean handkerchief in my pocket might have brought me dissipated entirely. I was drilled for hours at home for my Golden Hand; she was terrified I’d perform badly and show her up. I can’t tell you how many brown paper parcels I tied up, how many tea-trays I dutifully set and how many times I recited Die Stem in a language that, still fresh from the UK, I barely understood. I passed with 99% but joy once again fled as fellow fairies, elves and sprites insisted I must have cheated or been marked up because my mother was a Brown Owl.
The rebel in me no longer needed a cause and I worked hard at school to lower my marks.Brownie, and later, Guide camps were my pet hate. I would be packed off to an unsavoury resort called Robinson Lake, near Randfontein. We hiked from the train station to the campsite along concrete paths and weirs where we were warned to keep our distance from the water.
Hardly the word I’d use to describe the thick sludgy muck that heaved bubbled and stank like a witches’ brew out of Macbeth.Fresh from England’s bluebell glens, rolling cornfields laced with poppies and cornflowers, gracious expanses of acid-yellow mustard crops and plenteous green meadows, for me, mine dumps also held no charm.
Their sticky, sulphurous sand rejected most forms of plant-life, including weeds; signifying to me, pure evil. I simply could not imagine why anyone would build a drive-in on top of one. I now realise that beautiful Britain sports its own slag heaps. But 50 years ago that point was lost on me.At Robinson Lake this Brownie eventually graduated from laying my pack, sleeping bag and eventually even my head on a wooden bunk in a wooden cabin (that might not have seen a good scrub in a generation or two) to Guides, where pitching a tent and sleeping in it was obligatory.
The ground at Robinson Lake was something else! It sifted itself into our clothing, our bedding, our shoes and our eyes and mouths. It was dry and dead; did not bind with water and couldn’t sustain even a blade of grass. Damn it, it couldn’t even hold a tent peg satisfactorily!Great blue gums swayed overhead, but most seemed in the last stages of tragic despair.
On one occasion we travelled further afield to a Barberton army camp where the sand was at least red. I chiefly remember that camp because privacy in the toilets and showers did not exist. I certainly wasn’t about to flaunt my scrawny pre-pubescence in front of far older Guides and (God forbid) Guiders. I didn’t shower for a fortnight!And by the second week, the camp commandant spent every evening measuring out Bitter Cascara, Caster Oil and Epsom Salts to Guides who refused point blank to use the toilets in, shall we say, full view.
The supposed highlight of that camp was a visit to a local mine and a trip underground. Big whoop!
I carefully avoided it until the commandant, to whom I had taken an immediate and sincere dislike (which had been clearly returned), ordered me to join that particular day’s group. I pleaded a sore throat, but she was adamant. Suffice it to say that within 24 hours I had been hospitalised with a flaming temperature and acute tonsillitis. There I enjoyed several private warm baths and toilet doors that locked. When the ghastly woman phoned home to report to my mother, she at last learned that they were colleagues.
Game, set and match! For the rest of that camp, I was confined to a stretcher in the first-aid tent and fussed over, but the experience did nothing to endear me to mining or Guiders.At that time my father’s job involved travelling vast distances across the country to various mines to install and maintain pumps for which my uncle had obtained the agency. The uncle was doubtless delighted that his brother-in-law, newly returned to the land of his birth and jobless, had gained considerable experience as a mine shift boss before leaving South Africa in 1934 to join the Royal Air Force.
I knew the trips he made exhausted him; understood that he spent long shifts underground, working mainly alone and that his was dangerous work. In fact, all things considered, I probably knew more than the average 10-year-old about mining.
Nothing about it endeared it to me; from the way his work seeped my father’s spirit, to the devastation the industry leaves in its wake.
Other economies thrive without resort to the greedy avarice that is another mining by-product and I have moments when I suppose it is somewhat sad that, without the mining option, South Africa might have done more to develop its manufacturing sector.But mining is here to stay, as is the devastation it causes.
You know things are serious when government is moved to subsidise several mines that are losing the battle to contain and treat acid mine drainage (AMD). And AMD is presently yet another dire issue on the local agenda; and just like the rest, so far has no proven solution.AMD generally becomes a threat after mines stop operating and toxic metals contaminate underground and surface water. Our mines have been around for about 120 years. Many have been long since abandoned and few of the old companies still exist.
The Minister of Environmental Affairs, Buyelwa Sonjica, says the issue is made more problematic because the public purse should not be expected to fund an ongoing clean-up, but mine owners are faceless. I would have thought that, politically well-connected as she is, she could at least manage to track down the nephew of her president and the grandson of a former president. That would be a start.
Call in the Department of Communication... To win the battle, government must make up for the neglect, step in where responsibility is absent, treat AMD where it exists and continue to treat it...forever.
A major task for any government. Forgive me for wondering whether this one has the stamina to take on the exercise and deliver. Beside it, our power crisis is a bowl of cherries with whipped cream, except that power cuts automatically stop mines pumping AMD.
The threat is now. AMD is already contaminating rivers and wetlands and is likely to contaminate the water table for centuries. Add in global warming, potential drought and what will people have to drink?Do I hear you mutter, ‘Let them drink Coke’?
Okay, I’m being facetious, but AMD began flooding the western basin under the Witwatersrand at the rate of 20mn litres/day in 2002. Response to that wake-up call has taken eight years.
And where water treatment is done, it is seldom 100% effective. Profits have recently been low and miners accordingly cut water-treatment budgets. Neutralising the water and removing its harmful elements must be cost-effective and sustainable, but we can’t be sure how much treatment of how much AMD-contaminated water will be needed; surplus rainfall also drains into the basin. Moreover, contamination in the basin will affect its walls and floor; seismic activity is possible, as are claims for compensation, the death of wildlife, failure of agricultural irrigation and still unstable water delivery.
Oh, and a threat to the structural integrity of buildings in Johannesburg’s city centre exists. Plus damage to the Sterkfontein caves...wouldn’t that be a sad demise for the 3.5mn-year-old Cradle of Humankind: drowned by the superior intelligence of modern man?Gauteng mine voids could fill within 18 months. Miners about to close their marginal mines could speed up the decant and the doomsayers are already talking about AMD trickling along Johannesburg streets because the central basin is already flooded to within 600m of the surface. Pity the poor street dwellers...
Miners admit they need help.This scourge of our time faces the divided responsibilities for mining over several different government departments that struggle to work together and have poor regulation track records. But some or other minister has publically stated that an AMD solution could be found in five years with a national water quality programme.
But said, as we know, is not necessarily done.Because if we can’t get it right with all the president’s horses and all the president’s men, our future economic development, the safety of our people and our very existence could be severely affected. Not to mention tourism. Oops!
And this is where communication becomes a major factor. Government is likely to look to the private sector for brainpower and that’s good. We have long since learned that public-entity views are largely limited and that they have lost much of the engineering talent that once trod their hallowed halls and did the thinking.
Robinson Lake? Since 2002, when the Western Basin Void began to decant unexpectedly in the area, it has been used to store AMD. Harmony Gold claims to be dealing effectively with a hundred years’ of heavy-metal sediment and has recently been included in the National Nuclear Regulator’s certificate of registration.Should that little nugget of information reassure me?
A pilot specialist water-treatment plant will be built and hopefully this will lead to a full-scale clean-up over about three years. Once that is done, housing development is on the cards and people will be camping there far more permanently than I ever did.Studio M’s bottom line: For once, I believe the grass is a lot greener on my side of the fence, thanks.
Background
| The water treatment plant at the Grootvlei mine near Springs owned by Aurora Empowerment Systems was due to flood with acid mine water by Aug 1, closing down operations. The plant was only pumping 40 mega-litres of acid mine water/day instead of 108 mega-litres/day. Aurora now has the equipment to pump more and was due to install it last week. A criminal case against Aurora was opened after it allegedly failed to treat its pumped water before discharging it into a nearby river. AMD started flooding the pump station in June after workers, who had not been paid for months, downed tools. Zondwa Mandela, Aurora's MD and former president Nelson Mandela's grandson said it costs R6,5-million/month to run the plant and the firm had not received the R5-million/month state subsidy since last October; he called for government assistance. – Précis from Mining Weekly |
| Research has shown that South Africa will have a 6% water supply deficit by 2013, and an 11% deficit by 2019. Johannesburg Water statistics show that between 35% and 40% of the water the utility sells, is wasted. South Africa experiences six major issues: a mismatch between supply and demand; a failure to achieve DSM targets; decaying infrastructure; deteriorating water quality; loss of essential skills and the undervaluation of water supply. – Précis from Mining Weekly Head of water and sanitation in eThekwini municipality, Neil Macleod, maintains about 30% of household water is used to flush toilets, which is no longer viable. Dry toilets are not considered acceptable to consumers, for whom free water was an election promise. Recycling sewage water is more cost-effective than desalinating sea water, but water prices already don’t cover operating and maintenance costs, let alone capital investment. The Durban system’s depreciation is set at under R3bn, instead of a realistic R32bn. And the eThekwini municipality already has a R4.9bn debt to service. |
In South Africa
That’s because so few of the working people, who really do love soccer, are able to afford World Cup tickets. Even if they could, the booking procedure needs what qualifies for, in our dismal education system, a Ph. D. in advanced computer engineering with an additional major in English Literature.
The working opportunities promised to South Africans have largely fizzled out like a fire dampened by spring rain. And now, we’ve found that everything from World Cup clothing to its mascot is being manufactured in China
Whatever was FIFA thinking?
Did those who won the tenders honestly think this would never come to light? Or did they simply not care? In the case of Zakumi, the mascot, the tender was won by a chap who serves on parliament’s economic development committee.
Smell a rat? Think he may actually be working for the Chinese?
I’ve got to hand it to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on this occasion. It is shocking that the manufacture of a toy looking very like a misbegotten gnome or congenitally defective smurf and expected to be everyone’s ‘must have’, come the World Cup, is being manufactured in China, in a factory where teenage workers are paid only R23 a day for a 13-hour shift.
In American dollar terms, that’s around three; yes, three dollars a day.
The mascot’s name is apparently Zakumi and he is, I’m told, actually a dreadlocked leopard in soccer togs. The Sunday Times claimed the mascot would be sold for around R360 each; that’s about $48.
Which surely gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘return on investment’? ‘Daylight robbery’ seems more apt.
Cosatu is right. South African workers have been diddled out of work opportunities. We have an ever-growing non-working force which could have benefited from earning something; anything, in fact.
No wonder Zuma’s had such a bad year on the job creation front. He’s getting so desperate, he’s marrying right, left and centre, just so that by the next census his wives, at least, can write ‘housewife’ and not ‘unemployed’ in the relevant box.
Talk about manipulating data…
That cuts the unemployment stats by three, taking into account one suicide and a divorce. But on the other hand, those 20 children are 20 more that could be unemployed in later life. Perhaps it’s time we taught the President about swings and roundabouts, pertinent when you don’t own the entire fun fair!
Back to Industry World Cup.
It’s such a pity that given the sad circumstances of Chinese manufacture and South African poverty, our labour laws are too strict to allow people here to earn R23 a day. R23 can buy a loaf of white bread and two litres of Coke, the unhealthy lunch of choice for many South African labourers, factory and office workers.
In
There are clearly some things we aren’t usually told about the conditions in
But the mistakes about Zakumi, the Rastafarian kitty cat, began before his manufacture left our shores. Or even before the tender was awarded…
He doesn’t look even vaguely South African! It seems even Zakumi’s design was patented in China and what, pray tell, would the Chinese know about things South African that could have been incorporated to produce a truly African toy?
Local fabric designs, indigenous beadwork and even proudly South African recycled plastic could have made the grade. (Although there probably isn’t enough plastic left over from the manufacture of vuvuzelas, the noisome horns nobody with good sense likes.)
Cosatu made the point that the World Cup has been hijacked by big business; workers and the poor have been sidelined from the game they love.
We should, as a country, hang our heads in shame, that we were collectively too stupid to stop it. And believe me, ‘stupid’ is the only word that fits what has happened here.
The 2010 World Cup was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create jobs and improve the promotion of South African manufacturing and handwork. We’ve let it pass us by. We have injured those who could have expected better.
But what adds insult to that injury, is that FIFA, according to the Sunday Times, expects to underwrite a few thousand dollars in overall losses in South Africa
Possibly nothing compared to the losses small business, municipalities and budding entrepreneurs will make.
Studio M’s bottom line: I stopped attending the local meetings of a business network when they charged delegates to a business breakfast less than the food was costing them. Their overall overheads were obviously far higher. If you can count you can make a profit. Knowing exactly where you are losing money is the key to redeeming your bank balance.
Mo June 2010
Do you also retain titbits of fascinating information from your extreme youth?
One of the facts that clearly boggled my son’s mind is that I have three kidneys. He learnt that at four, when I had an operation. I’m sure he barely knew what a kidney was and I doubt he had any idea that they usually came in pairs.
But as he grew up, so the fact remained with him.
About seven years later, he told this to his teacher and was sent to the headmaster with his tail between his legs. Having ranted and raved that I’d be on the front page of the Sunday Times were this so, the nice man rang me to say he was expelling the child because he told stories.
I asked about the stories and got fed the juicy titbit. I confirmed the truth. I have three kidneys.
Some men just don’t take well to the deflation process, do they? Had he been able to expel me, he would have!
My imagination, on the other hand, was captured, at about four years’ old, by the tale that the people who painted the railway bridge across the Firth of the Forth in Scotland
It was often said that the chaps started at one side of the river and painted their way to the other side. Then they began again.
Painting the bridge required filling a dead man’s shoes.
I don’t remember caring much about the other details of their lives, but by the time they reached the far end, it must have been a jolly long walk home at night. What interested me was that they repeated the exercise throughout their adult life; again, and again and again…rather like washing and ironing and cooking and cleaning.
It might not be true. I heard it from my father and he was a past master at taking the mick!
But it does illustrate an important point.
Upkeep and maintenance can provide jobs that last lifelong.
And what is South Africa
There’s a lesson here that no-one needs a pass in woodwork to understand. Even if you can’t put the shelf up absolutely straight because you don’t fully understand the purpose of a level: that pole with the floating air bubble, if the shelf is not treated with varnish or paint regularly, either the borer beetle (down our way) or the weather, will eventually get to it.
And it will only be a matter of time before your slightly crooked shelf will have rotted right away.
I was crassly critical of Durban
By the time I stopped swimming in the heated water of the Kings Park
Any bets?
In lieu of Kings Park
I am amazed at the potential of our local public pool areas. The pools themselves are absolutely necessary in our hot summers. But the surrounding grounds also put distance between self and the city irritations and they are places of sheer pleasure, particularly when not overcrowded.
Or they would be if the grass was only cut regularly; the weeds didn’t grow through the cracked paving and someone could be bothered to plant up the few beds with something hardy, but pretty and then commit to turning the soil occasionally.
Supply one lawnmower, a weed eater, a couple of spades and forks to each swimming facility and the staff who are already earning salaries to spend most of their days sitting about doing nothing, could slowly get the gardens into shape with the help of another one or two. Incentives could be paid for keeping equipment in good working order.
Did you know that the old repair workshops have been closed? So, more jobs were lost.
I am always amazed at how concrete is regularly hosed down for hours, despite the fact that we should be using the wet stuff sparsely, but struggling plants are never watered.
And there are no adequate gardening services.
The question begs to be asked: if we cannot even mow a lawn regularly, how can we expect to fill and tar the gazillion potholes on our roads?
Nazir Alli, CEO of the South African National Roads’ Agency, had the grace to point out recently that ongoing maintenance on our road system would cost far less overall, than reconstructing entire routes long after they have fallen into disrepair.
I’m surprised he let the secret out. After all, his agency is making a fortune out of tolling us all for every kilometre we drive on his freeways. He seems to be the only road owner in the land who can afford to keep his roads in even reasonable condition.
Ask not why it costs so much, but where your fuel levies and taxes go…
But Alli is correct. If municipalities trained their own staff to maintain their property and managed their own planning, instead of hiring clerks who they hope will develop the ability to manage consultants, everything would be in good nick. Instead, those small contractors, the consultants, are busy managing the system.
A clerk who sits at a desk is unlikely ever to develop a feel for how often a lawnmower should be serviced, its lifespan or even the intricacies of collecting litter from suburban and township verges.
Neither of which, you must agree, are rocket science.
It also doesn’t take an engineer to fill a pothole. The first step is to have an inspector. He’s paid to find out that the pothole is there! The subsequent steps are also not impossible for relatively unskilled people to learn.
They are best completed and are more cost-effective, when succinct planning has been done.
We’ve lost count of the times the same stretch of pavement and road in Glenwood has been lifted in a year. In a single month, the same stretch was lifted twice! First: to lay a pipe. A fortnight later again: to lay a cable beside the pipe. They rip up the intersection every time the robots go on the blink.
Now if someone with half a brain, or two people with a quarter-brain each, had planned the exercises, they could have halved the price and the time it took; especially since it would have needed only one person to boil the billycan for tea three times a day.
This then, for all those who have not yet got the point, is why were introduced to fractions in Grade 1. We didn’t need to pass Matric to learn about halves and quarters. We only needed to see whether it was Johnny or Mary who got the largest piece of cake. I’m quite certain that Themba or Thuli are no different.
Get the sum right and no one is left with only a dirty plate to wash. We also decided quite quickly whether we wanted to bake the cake, buy the cake, sell the cake, cut the cake, or be the one who did absolutely nothing except choose the biggest slice.
And I don’t believe that even our worst teachers teach their pupils to steal the entire cake and run! Though they’d probably run off with it themselves if they had half the chance…
I really do believe there is a way to get more people into full-time employment, but I’m pleased to note that the one job function that South Africa
My son held forth last night on the subject of inconsistent chromosomes, genetic differences and the preference some people have for learning visually. He’s one of them. He advocates good, old-fashioned apprenticeships as the direct route to higher employment, job satisfaction and lifelong jobs, which allow for self-empowerment and promotion.
Studio M’s bottom line: I smiled. He turns 21 next month and it was really satisfying to watch the monologue and realise that some of what I say and believe still makes an indelible impression!
Mo May 2010
I bought a new kettle a few months ago…nothing special, not particularly expensive.
After all, what do I want of a kettle? It must hold water, boil and pour.
This one manages the first and the second but falls down hopelessly on the third. At whatever angle it’s held, it dribbles as we pour. Not just while it’s full; at any speed we pour however much, boiling water dribbles from the spout down the front of the appliance, leaving a pool all over the immediate counter top and on the tray which is its home.
I’ve now resorted to keeping the kettle on a folded dish cloth to absorb the excess. Not ideal. Damp cloths stay damp and breed germs. At least it can’t be a fire hazard; it’s always wet.
So how did this happen? Industrial design has been with us since the late forties. Any kettle manufacturer that can’t afford a full-time industrial designer can surely afford to have the design of its new products checked out by a freelancer?
Actually, you could probably find a design program by simply Googling: ‘how to design a kettle’.
My kettle is doubtless a cheap knock-off of the once-trusted Essentials kitchen range. My mother, whose kettle lasted longer than her marriage, because she died just short of the silver wedding, would have muttered ‘Japanese rubbish’.
But that was then. Nowadays, cheap and nasty can come from anywhere. And surely even a cheap knock-off could be knocked off with a little more flair? How much does it take to make a spout functional, pray tell?
I should have been paid to buy that kettle…
More recently, I dashed into Woolworths to buy a gift voucher as a wedding gift. The bride had stipulated gift tokens.
The vouchers are like mock credit cards and come in a range of colours. They’re adorned with words and graphics that clearly display the limited imagination of either the marketing department or the designer.
After eschewing the livid pink, the grass green and the sombre black, all with personal one-to-one messages, I decided the white was probably the least offensive, even though the bride already had previous experience in the role, as did the groom.
But I was horrified when the voucher was tucked inside an un-sealable open card with no envelope provided.
When I later checked, there was no space for a message and no value on the card. I have no doubt that the bride’s worth a lot more than I spent, but were I her, I would be humiliated to have to ask at the store how much I and my new marriage could afford to spend!
By the time I was four, I could count for myself whatever I had in my hot, sweaty palm. I’ve not had to ask since.
Moreover, unless a voucher is a one-to-one gift, few of us are there when it’s opened.
What happens to your gift when you arrive at any occasion? What bride would open her gifts at the reception? With all due respect, would you leave an unsealed gift token in a pile with the hired help coming and going? Would any South African be content to leave such a gift lying around in any public place?
Clearly, the design brief did not include salient points like: target market, obligatory features, etc. Do graphic and packaging designers now just design dinky and pretty, with no thought to practicality, aims or objectives? It seems exactly that way for Woolworths. Standards must be dropping…
Other, bigger business cons of the moment concern everything from the World Cup to national strikes and really are a laugh a minute.
The World Cup, which was to present far more opportunity for almost every South African alive (if you believed the marketing hype) is bringing under 400 000 visitors to our sunny shores.
Big whoop!
Uncapped Internet is another farce. While some Internet prices have dropped, there are no really fantastic deals out there for the little man, woman or child. As my son says, “Unshaped is a euphemism for: nothing until after midnight”.
What supposedly keeps Internet prices flying high is Telkom’s last mile. No matter the number of undersea cables or satellites in Cloud Cuckooland (not as in cloud computing), the price of the line from your local exchange to your home or business is still, on average, over 70% of the cost of broadband access; or as some call it: the Telkom tax.
Then there was a wonderful story I heard way back in January about how, when they tested the fuel connections at Durban
The Sunday Times quoted the cost of the airport as having risen from the R3bn budgeted, to R8bn.
By now we all know that, in fact, the connections simply didn’t connect at all and fuel seepage, into the surrounding soil was, and still is, the problem. So much for South Africa
Especially with the ocean only a few paces and a highway away. Beware of any man with a board who tells you the surf’s smokin’…it could just be a 6mn-litre puff of smoke.
Perhaps laying a new pipeline between Durban and Gauteng Durban
Anyone smell jet fuel…or simply a rat?
We’re into national strike season again and are supposedly lucky that so many are out on strike before the World Cup. Some union members can obviously still afford soccer tickets.
But last month a municipal worker told me that going out on strike no longer means going without.
He and his colleagues go into work regardless, clock in, collect their wages, but bar the public, thus satisfying their peers that they aren’t working.
The catch is that their union, these days, deducts strike pay from their wages all year, in order to replenish the pay packets of ‘loyal’ workers when they ‘march’. We all already know, of course, that overtime rates, after the break, fast replenish missing pay packets, but now it seems that going on strike is quite a lucrative business. And all a big con!
There doesn’t seem to be much incentive to go out to work anymore, does there?
Even Pravin Gordhan, our Minister of Finance, smells a tax rat.
Studio M’s bottom line: Be proud of me. I actually kept off local politics…but business is on the move. Although I’m not entirely sure that it’s doing the South African economy, the South African workers or the South African Revenue Service any good at all! As my mother would have said: ‘Where does all the money go every month?’ Oops! How silly of me, to Al Qaeda, of course!
Mo April 2010
So here we sit in sunny South Africa
A once extreme right-wing leader, last week not much more than a farmer, was hacked to pieces in his bed over the Easter weekend. His following was never particularly large and seemed to have dropped significantly, so I would have thought his murder, although disgusting, not politically relevant.
But many perceive it to be. In fact, our president seemed to think it is, else why would he have begged for calm? I wonder what he knows that I don’t. Don’t you all feel exactly the same?
Word is out that jailed prisoners knew this incident was about to happen; that it was on a political agenda and pertains to other extremist views; notably those made odiously public by Julius Malema, head honcho of the ANCYL (ruling party’s youth league).
Mostly, people like me have been calm our entire lives. We are past masters of calm.
The problem is that calm gets no one anywhere. Not us, not others…
During apartheid we shrugged our shoulders and kept out of trouble. Not very courageous and something we are continually made to feel very guilty about now, while we are doing exactly the same again all over again.
It really isn’t in my cultural background to riot, toyi-toyi, empty litter bins all over streets and get hysterical in public. My ancestors threw that kind of behaviour out of the window when serfdom faded away; further back than many here can count.
English-speaking South Africans tend more to discuss situations quietly, feel senses of foreboding, put their shoulders to the grindstone and carry on regardless. Or pack up and leave for whatever country will accept them.
At present, what worries us most is that so few of our population really benefit from affirmative action, Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment, service delivery, salary increases, good education, public-health facilities and social-welfare programmes, etc.
On the other hand, social welfare surrounds us.
The statistics speak for themselves. We have 12mn people receiving social grants and the club is growing. The total population, including various immigrants from other African countries, could be as high as 50mn. Between 25% and 40% of our population is unemployed, depending on whether official or unofficial statistics are used to determine the number.
There are about 6mn taxpayers in the country. Work it out; before tax payers have paid their own rent, they’ve already paid the social grants of, on average, two people.
No wonder maintaining infrastructure is so low on the state’s agenda.
Most exporters pray for a weak rand, in order to maximise their income; they are incapable of manufacturing competitively because our productivity is low and our labour laws are restrictive.
The higher our interest rate, the more investment comes our way. We are considered attractive to foreigners, especially those with fixed incomes, who cannot earn in their own countries what they can from ours. Should our interest rates drop much lower, that investment could retreat overnight.
It has been said that our social grant costs are soon likely to rise to R400bn a year. This amount produces nothing and employs no one. As such, it is money being quietly flushed quietly down the drain, to mingle with our latest scourge: acid mine drainage.
Xstrata CEO, Mick Davis, recently told the Wits Business School
Although inflation has been hobbled, it is set to gallop again as the effect of new power and fuel increases hit us. Both will influence the price of every product in the country and the larger proportion of the population already finds both virtually impossible to afford.
With the soccer World Cup on our doorstep, many people are beginning to understand that stadiums feed no one and they have influenced the state’s ability to fulfil the promises the ruling party has made.
Where will government find the money it needs to pacify the working (or usually non-working) classes?
Dear Chairman of the World Bank…(there’s one born every minute).
And this is where Julius Malema’s outrageous whipping up of youthful frustrations becomes a concern. Many believe that whatever he rants is, sooner or later, bound to happen; from the nationalisation of businesses and mines, to land redistribution and free tertiary education for millions who haven’t yet been able to pass their first year at learning institutions.
As a first-year student, my son has recently had direct contact with students in various states of frenzy and is visibly shaken each time it happens. DUT has threatened to close indefinitely should any more time be lost, but as he says, the riots occur each time tests or exams are scheduled. The last lot of disruptions turned violent and serious students of all races feared for their lives.
Malema infers that global business will simply accept whatever conditions and limitations the state sets on their activities in this country because it so badly needs our commodities. He seems to have forgotten Zim, a country that refuses to get its act together unless sanctions on a relatively small number are lifted.
Meanwhile, London-listed diversified miner, Xstrata is already withholding a R5bn investment due to power uncertainty.
A drop, you may think, in the ocean.
But can South Africa
The strength of South Africa
Monday’s UK Daily Star headline roared: ‘World Cup fans face bloodbath’, ‘Machete threat to World Cup fans’, citing a source at FIFA saying that the tournament could be postponed until next year if things get any worse, because it’s too late to go for Plan B.
And then, if all the dreams came tumbling down? I now realise why everyone’s been calling it a ‘once in a lifetime chance’. The thing about a rollercoaster is that you can’t get off once it gets going and someone could have pressed the button just a wee bit too early.
Tomorrow, the UK
Veteran breakfast radio host, Daryl Ilbury, wrote of politics: ‘The truth is often hidden behind a veil of lies and rhetorical obfuscation.’ That’s more or less how I feel about TerreBlanche’s murder. Too much has been left unsaid and the court sessions are held ‘in camera’.
Hmmm…do I get a whiff of apartheid, here? Perhaps the TRC missed the boat?
Ilbury also said that Malema has at least got us all debating issues. About which, I suspect, he knows less than nothing. Malema, that is. I’m going to start watching for when the script seems to end each time. I do wish he’d learn to stay calm.
Personally, I’d like to see debate and discussion among South Africa
These kids will want jobs one day. Perhaps it’s time to get them onto their multiplication tables? Subtraction, at least, would be a good start and stand them in good stead…
Tonight I read a statement by South Africa
Studio M’s bottom line: So sure, I’ll stay calm. But if I have to leave, my business goes with me.
MoMarch 2010
Answers to our World Cup questions are slowly beginning to filter through the hype. How will June 2010 affect you and your business?
I received a simply marvellous e-mail on the expected state of the nation during the soccer World Cup this year.
‘Marvellous’ because I at last read about how it will be, rather than as officialdom dreams it will be. It answered a few questions that have bothered me for months.
We live and work here; run our lives, our businesses, feed our families and must stay solvent for the duration.
I didn’t hoard food before the 1994 elections, predict disaster for the new millennium (which we anyway entered a year early) and nor do I believe the world will end with the Mayan calendar!
But I anticipate June 2010 with trepidation.
In Durban, we know that businesses near the stadium and fan-park will be closed on match days. Some normal signage may need covering and it follows that street traders might find themselves moved to less profitable areas.
A bit sad for those that hoped to make a killing, but even they now realise that it’s all about the greater good of the greater Coca-Cola, McDonalds, etc.
Whatever made them think it was ever all about them?
The e-mail reported on a Gary Bailey speech. Bailey has been involved in two previous World Cups. I hope his stats are authentic.
If you are considering leaving the country for the duration, or on business, beware! R8 000.00 into CT, Bailey said, although not from where. I Googled the airlines to check, but the Internet closed down on me, which it often does.
How will our slow broadband cope with all those first-world tourists and the media?
The best time to fly, apparently, is during the matches. But don’t go anywhere at all, unless it’s critical.
So beg all your relatives to take special care of their health during June. Emergency trips to bury them will very inconvenient, needing 2-3 hours extra to get to an airport and even worse flight delays than usual.
(Take padkos and several bottles of water in your hand luggage.)
Drop-off and collection at airports will be an even worse hell than usual, Bailey said.
I haven’t parked at Durban airport for over three years, when I had to hike back to the airport from the nether regions of Prospecton to see my son off to Oz for a year.
Airlines and airports will operate 24 hours a day. Bailey claims the noise will drive us crazy. At last I see the sense of moving Durban’s airport north. Youngsters poetically call our environ ‘Scumbilo’. But I feel it may rise from the dead with the value of our home, until now, right under the Johannesburg flight path!
Pricing is always an in-season issue.
All businesses price their products and services for profit. In or out of season. When business is at its best, why the need (or greed) to increase prices so much?
I’m afraid I find the irony of empty Durban B&Bs somewhat sad. It’s a huge lesson in how not to price your business out of the market, but one all South Africans badly needed to learn.
Hold that thought!
Regarding our more personal comfort, Bailey said there will be restrictions on long- and short-distance deliveries. Fresh fruit and vegetables are unlikely to be available.
If so, logic tells me there could be shortages of all groceries. What supermarket has sufficient space to cold-store a month’s sales in meat? Will even the long-life milk get through?
Or is it to be a month of sauerkraut and baked beans? At very high prices?
Ask why the new oil pipeline from Durban to Jhb hasn’t yet been laid. And if the fuel depot moves to Coega, will they need another?
And getting your wares through to harbours?
If you’re not planning to be there in the flesh, I’m sure every intelligent South African over 30 has planned to stay well away from soccer stadiums and fan parks during the action.
Vehicle and people congestion is likely to be horrific. Think New Year in Hillbrow, especially in Durban, where fans will have a long walk to the stadium. I’m one of the few who believe that etv’s supposedly unethical scare story on World Cup crime actually gave us all a timely reminder.
Bailey’s stats apparently show that at one German fan park, 500 000 people pitched, ate 3mn sausages and drank 1mn litres of beer. Durban’s fan park might have been better located where McDonalds could have served bunny chow with Wet Wipes!
I’m still sulking that our only local heated pools have been closed, drained and decked over to provide Durban with a media centre. Seems to me a few golf carts between the stadium and the ICC would have been more sensible, cost-effective and pragmatic.
Better toilets, catering facilities, power, the works!
I think I’ll stay home with a few good movies for the entire month.
Your kids’ mid-year school holiday needs planning. My mother would have thrived on it; I was always enrolled in a holiday tennis clinic. Even when I lost interest, the tennis clinics remained regular features on my limited landscape and only stopped when I went, permanently and irretrievably, to boarding school.
The fun starts when media groups arrive, April 25, just in time for Freedom Day. Last year, workers at the Ethekwini municipality promised a strike two weeks before the World Cup, to compensate for getting lower increases last year than they demanded.
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Then, a recent Daily News story warned that the benefits of the World Cup have been over-estimated. Who would have guessed that?
A Human Sciences Research Council report says poor local ticket sales could jeopardise WC success; that jobs created, achieved minimal skills transfer. Yes, the ones already terminated.
Tourism benefits, the HSRC claims, might not exceed 0.5% of GDP. University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society agrees.
And here’s the best bit: the Zakumi factory, in China, was forced to suspend operations when audited after media reports that it is a sweatshop, Sapa has reported. Oops! We’re still at least 100 000 dreadlocked plastic leopards short of a World Cup!
It could be all downhill from here, Guys! I thought of spending the World Cup abroad, but we can’t afford the flight to Jhb!
The saving grace in all this is a report published by the U.S.-based National Bureau of Economic Research.
It claims, contrary to popular belief that Africa’s riches are spreading beyond the elite few, making the poor less so. So if you think you are a good deal poorer now than you were two decades ago, do read it at http://www.nber.org/papers/w15775.
It blows the myth off Africa’s ‘forever a victim stance’ and makes hard work, particularly in a recessive economy, worthwhile.
Studio M’s bottom line: Perhaps World Cup inconvenience will be the last frustrating lap for many and we can then concentrate on economic growth and benefiting all South Africans in a really sustainable manner. Here is definitely hoping!
Mo February 2010
Marketing is essential to every company, product and service…
…but the discipline carries so may clichés, that it remains difficult to label any one format either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’
So, what do you know about marketing?
Ø It’s not a scientific discipline.
Ø Some proportion of marketing spend is always wasted.
Ø But no formula can tell you which the wasted proportion will be.
Ø It’s all trial and error.
If you consider marketing to be an ongoing process, rather than a discipline with a ‘start’ and a ‘finish’, you are likely to reap far better benefits from your efforts, than most.
Because marketing deals with an ever-changing entity: markets.
And markets are made up of dynamic, ever-changing buyers. They age, change their spending habits, adapt their taste and their needs; people come and people go.
One of the most fascinating things about aging has been the realisation that I am no longer considered part of any real target market. No one fights to sell me a home, insurance, furniture, music or fashion, any more. I already have so many of those things. But if I want to replace a saucepan, I find saucepans are now sold in sets and if I want one, I must buy six. Surely only newlyweds need six new saucepans…what on earth would I do with the other five?
And, let’s be honest, I am no longer sylph-like, so in more ways than one, I don’t fit the mould. I’ll only want a new home when I down-size; my furniture is mainly antique, not mass-produced; my music is mellow and has stood the test of time and I’ve bought all the insurance I can afford (and some I no longer can).
Marketers look to much younger people to buy most of their products: the teeny-weenies, the teenage hellions, the upwardly mobile or future families; in short, Generations X, Y and Z. On my part, that’s good! The only marketers who still bother me are banks (and if they checked my bank balance and debt load first, they’d leave me alone entirely!)
Where to start with a marketing mix?
Affordability is as good a guide as any. No SME would book ongoing national TV coverage, for instance. Not only is it unaffordable, but only a large company or franchise system can usually service national response to great TV advertising.
Here are ten great commandments for successful management of the marketing process:
1. Your market knows what it wants. You may be bright; you may be clever, but the people who buy (or don’t) also have opinions and are easily swayed. Never make the critical mistake of assuming you know what your market needs. Ask it! Tons of companies target markets that provide little of their income. For example: I hate all the latest TV ads for mobile airtime. They are so uncouth, they make me long to bin my mobile! But I’m not a big customer. The advertisers have at last found, and are exploiting, their major market.
2. Continually ask questions. The best marketers have insatiable curiosity and questions reveal questioning, intelligent minds. Products fail daily because they are the wrong colour, are too big or too small…questions need answers; find them.
3. Back up all argument with evidential rationale. Argument without facts or proof to back it up is merely opinion. We all know what we like, but that doesn’t mean others like it too.
4. Lead with strong conviction. It’s management’s job to enable and to lead onwards into new territory. If your team grumbles and disagrees, get them to find their own answers, but don’t discount their opinions. Continually ‘pushing the envelope’ is essential to good marketing management.
5. Surround yourself with positive people. I’m in two minds about this one…whilst essential optimists make every team easier to coordinate I don’t believe marketing should forge ahead without relevant research, assessment and report-back. If people don’t like the taste, they’ll only buy the muffin once and sales will drop before the marketing campaign is done. You owe it to your client or employer to be absolutely positive about product or service credentials before you throw money at them.
6. Learn from your mistakes. If you don’t take risks and make mistakes, you won’t learn anything about your products, your services or your market. Marketing without ongoing research, markets to a vacuum. Always aim to reach beyond what you already know.
7. Don’t do it alone. Whether you have an internal marketing team or you use an agency or freelancers, listen and include every opinion you can. Discover each person’s value and apply it to the tasks in hand. Ra-ra people may bolster your confidence, but they may also easily miss essential detail.
8. Commit to generating momentum and dynamic activity. Campaigns include important feedback, like researching target markets, product popularity, service needs and follow-ups. How many enquiries did your promotion generate? How many sales come via your web site? How are web site queries handled? Do they clinch deals? Activity based on logic, generates momentum and gets results, creating confidence in the marketing process.
9. Hire people who are smarter than you. For true innovation, new ideas are essential and new ideas are generated, not learnt. Find people who think differently and, once tested, let them manage new initiatives. By all means, expect status reports, but give them relative freedom to operate.
10. Honour your failures. That’s right! With no failures, you’ve not learnt what your buying public doesn’t like; in short, nothing! Whether you use this approach in product design, service orientation or in the promotional context, failures give you valuable contextual information for future decisions.
Feedback by invitation: the customer club
The best possible way to get cost-effective customer feedback is to ask customers directly.
Not while they are shopping…irritating when their time is limited and they are expecting service from others, but do invite shoppers to join a customer club. Club members should receive advance warning of sales and special offers, or be offered special discounts at intervals. Once you have contact details, you can invite 5-10 customers to talk frankly about your products or services.
Even sharp criticism is surely the best way to gain honest feedback? Show the group possible new products, proofs of new marketing materials and ask their opinions. Their reaction to your marketing messages and product/service mix will be valuable.
For the price of beverages, a few snacks and possibly a coupon or small gift, these customers leave feeling flattered because their opinions matter to you. Their sense of brand loyalty is renewed and each will regale countless friends and relations with the detail.
Each month, invite a different group and collate a file of information about customer needs, interests, family sizes and the reasons they purchase from you.
One of my best experiences was joining a course to learn all about Persian carpets. The group absorbed the basic history and background of these exclusive rugs over months and we all wanted to own one! We were flattered by the personal attention we received and became loyal customers.
Studio M’s bottom line: Creativity is best managed by basic, logical disciplines and marketing does not need to cost a small fortune if you work to a plan and use all the information at your disposal. If you lack information, find it!
MoJanuary 2010
The recession may be officially over, but I’m quite sure this year’s Day of Reconciliation still had people and businesses more interested in reconciling their bank balances than spreading peace and goodwill.
Just as in, ironically, our political arena…
…I never thought I’d see the day when I’d root for COSATU. But there you are, let’s not go there. I’m going to make a concerted effort to get into the spirit and simultaneously wish you all a blessed Christmas and a better New Year next time around.
Prosperous? Well, certainly, some still are. Many, though, are still counting the cost.
These days, where do we find the warm, fuzzy feelings that used to be the hallmark of any marketing plan?
Fuzzy and warm went out of the window in favour of hip, modern, trendy and hot. In Cape Town it’s ‘kif’. Heaven knows what Johannesburg calls it, but I’m pretty darn sure that Durban youngsters still say ‘cool’.
About the only brand that really warms my cynical heart is Google; fantastic products and the only time it doesn’t deliver or is slow, I can blame month-end, Telkom or my Internet provider.
If Google is at fault, I never find out.
Whatever marketing Google uses to promote itself, I am largely unaware of. But on the occasions when the basic logo on the search page incorporates a further message, I am always charmed!
Mothers’ Day, July 4, Halloween and a few more days this year, had quaint, whimsical illustrations. When Sesame Street celebrated its anniversary, every day for a week delighted me.
The point is not really the illustrations. It’s the fact that these departures are minimal, but inspirational. They don’t cost me anything and don’t leave me believing that money has been unnecessarily wasted.
They make my day and me feel that I matter.
Soft-sell marketing is an approach that aims to benefit far more than the bottom line.
Traditional marketers focus on the externals: price, discounts, packaging, sales, bonuses and guarantees. It’s all a matter of money and financial gain.
Business always has been a matter of making money, but in the days when it was uncouth to mention the obscene amounts that could be made, somehow it was easier for the masses to live with.
Now that we are told that profit must satisfy the MD/owner or the shareholders, we are left in no doubt that many MD-owners and shareholders are nothing short of greedy.
It’s no small wonder that workers demand impractical increases. CEO bonuses are equally so. Even at the cost of losing valued custom and berating those who have no option but to buy through their own pain. Either way, they have no power, as Eskom so obviously illustrates.
The soft-sell marketer believes there is more to business rewards than dominating a sector, making money or the excitement of crushing the competition.
He or she believes the internals are equally, or more, important.
Personal and professional integrity is the primary internal benefit in soft-sell marketing. It’s not necessary to separate the desire to create and sustain a substantial income from an equal desire to treat customers and potential consumers with dignity, respect, and consideration.
Integrity is about creating unity between what you believe, what you do and how you do it; who you are and what you want; how you treat your customers and how you expect to be treated.
Doing business with integrity eliminates the conflict between what your heart believes, how you write sales copy and make presentations.
Ø It becomes easier to create clear and coherent messages because one side of your brain is at peace with the other. Lack of integrity produces mixed and confusing messages.
Ø Prospective customers more easily recognise and understand who you are and what you provide. Your customers identify with you more easily.
Ø Conflicting intentions are easily noticed by your employees, who become discouraged, disenchanted and can make or break your business.
Ø Your heart and soul can really enjoy the experience. Your customers feel secure that your product or service will deliver on the promises you make.
Ø It becomes far easier to develop the relationship because proven trustworthiness and care for your customers has free by-products: loyalty and repeat sales.
Staying true to who you are, improves your own well-being, that of your employees, customers and your company.
It creates unity of purpose. Money earned delivers more value to your customers and becomes income well-deserved. You'll have both a sound emotional and spiritual conscience…
…which will help you and your business respond more ethically next year to issues such as water scarcity and global warming.
Studio M’s end-of-2009 bottom lines: Right! My sweet nature has all been used up.
- I believe banks should treat their existing customers better than new customers and cherish those who pay off major debt (some hopes). The little clerks they call consultants also need far better training.
- Telkom should stop advertising a product they can’t yet sell (the new broadband).
- The municipality came to check my electricity meter last week, convinced it was not working because my charges are so low. The verdict? It’s in perfect working order, So Boo! Sucks! Mike Sutcliffe and Eskom. Now where’s the free light bulb you promised me?
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