Friday night: Khalo Matabane
`Where should we go?” This became the most popular Friday- night question of 1998. Every Friday we moved from sushi bars to kwaito bashes, lefty parties to restaurants and clubs. Driving back home, we complained about the lack of entertainment for young black professionals to such an extent that Tumi decided to open an upmarket joint. So every week I pray that someone invites me for dinner and one of my 1999 resolutions is to stay indoors.
“We can’t have the chicken curry until Bongani is here,” says my hostess, Jane. It’s late already, past conventional dinner time. We are sitting at a dinner table in Randburg. There’s Rehad, the Pan Africanist Congress’s late Barney Desai’s son, his wife, Victoria, and their son, Nick. Across the table from me, Jane is speaking to Victoria in German. We are waiting for a certain Bongani to come, he is still at a PAC conference.
I call Nthato, a young Wits university student I met at McDonald’s in Craighall one Friday evening and was convinced I was going to get married to. At first she refused to give me her number until I said something so stupid that everyone laughed. She had nowhere to go but the movies. She was also going to Hyde Park to see Armageddon, like the rest of us. Throughout our conversation, I hope that she will realise that I want her to come over and join us. But she is out with the girls. Viva!
There is so much drinking and smoking. Nkosazana Zuma should be here. For the first time I notice the music. I ask who it is. It’s Joshua Redman. I invite Tumi over. He is busy. He has a magazine to publish. Tumi is the editor of Y magazine. He’s the one who introduced me to JR. I have never really been a fan of JR.
Jane wants to know where Bongani is. Everyone has a high regard for Bongani. He is the son of the PAC’s late David Sibeko, who was brutally murdered. Silence. Before I came to dinner I was reading “murder … murder …” from Antjie Krog to Ariel Dorfman (Death and the Maiden). I decide to find solace in love and call Nthato again. She mumbles something about “context … context”, seeing me tomorrow and being with the girls. Viva! I am heartbroken.
The music has changed. It’s Sibongile Khumalo doing Thula Mama. Fantastic. Phone rings. Rehad starts yelling. “Bongani where the hell are you?” Suddenly he looks at me and laughs. I have diverted my calls to Jane’s phone. I burst out laughing. It’s Bongani, a different Bongani, a friend of mine. Bongani #2 has been locked out of a dinner date because he arrived late.
I go to the fridge for some orange juice. I notice a photo of Mama Albertina Sisulu holding Josh (Jane’s son). Excitement breaks out. Bongani has arrived. I go outside to meet him. We break into laughter. We know each other. The last supper starts.
He tells us how he introduced himself at the conference. “My name is Bongani. I was with the struggle. Now I’ve joined the petty bourgeoisie ranks. I’m here to make sure that you come to my restaurant.” Bongani owns a restaurant at the top of the Carlton Centre.
I start feeling tired. I lie on the floor for a while. Sound of Winston Mankuku’s Jika and the smell of coffee. It’s Saturday morning and I’m still lying on Jane’s living-room floor. I’m embarrassed.
Khalo Matabane is a film-maker currently involved in developing a feature documentary
@The art of re-entrenchment
Loose cannon:Robert Kirby
If you have ever wondered where your tax-rand goes, take a look in the Appointments section of newspapers. Among the attractive careers in commerce and industry, there are those half-page adverts inviting applications for positions in the upper bureaucracy.
These usually appear under some banner, like Greater Gauteng Roads Administration or the Department of Home Affairs, and are most instructive, especially in the matter of job descriptions.
A recent job advert for Chief Director: Maternal, Child and Women’s Health included among the duties: “… evaluation of progress in the implementation of RDP priority programmes and facilitate [sic] the reduction and ultimate elimination of poverty-related and communicable diseases … facilitation of the promotion of healthy behaviour in families [Please Adjust Your Dress Before Wiping!] … the promotion of the interaction of the chief directorate with other chief directorates within the department, non-governmental and private institutions for the promotion of the vision and mission of the National Department of Health”.
That is only a quarter of the total job description in this instance, so it shouldn’t come as a shock to see that such commodious responsibility is apparently worth only R239 000 per annum.
I tried to work out what actual time the lucky appointee would have to polish each spoke of such a complicated wheel. It’s about eight days a spoke. Mind you, when it comes to dashing off a quick “implementation of international instruments in the field of women and children, including the CEDAW, UN, CRC, ICPD, Beijing Platforms of Action, including international, regional and national liaison in these fields” why squander an entire eight days?
Six at the most. The spare two could be carried over for “the implementation of facilitation of the reduction and ultimate elimination of poverty-related and communicable diseases”.
The health department’s way of budget- stretching is nothing by comparison with no less than 17 directorships and chief directorships currently up for grabs in the Provincial Administration of the Western Cape. Though vibrating with “implementations”, “evaluations” and “monitorings”, these posts also offer clutchpenny reward. Only R350 000 for a Chief Director in anything from Human Resource Management Services through Supra Regional Hospitals to Programming Support. Add the car, the housing scheme, the secretaries, all the other perks, and it’s about R520 000 per director, or nearly R9-million a year for the job lot.
Small beer when the humble taxpayers know that their Director of Programme Development (Health Services Branch) in the provincial administration will, on their behalf, be “articulating the implementation of PHC programmes” while her lusty counterpart in the Programme Support offices will be wrestling with the “management of desks in respect of the aforementioned programmes”.
Any struggling Cape Town artist will feel that much more secure knowing that the Chief Director: Cultural Affairs has a firm grip on the province’s aesthetic reins, especially when it comes to “liaison with and monitoring of the new Cultural Commission, Cultural Councils and Language Committee, development and effective implementation of a provincial policy on cultural affairs and the promotion of all aspects of culture”.
How on earth did Michelangelo get by without one of those? We know he had the occasional pope peering suspiciously up at him, but where was a Chief Director (recognised B degree or equivalent) charged with “facilitating the maintenance and review of his operational systems and procedures”?
I seem to remember that along the transformation line quite a few of our new political mandarins have been stressing the need to disembowel the bloated South African civil service, strip out all the accumulated barnacles and leeches, the sinecured residue of 46 years of National Party nepotism.
In doing this, the politicians have to date spent about 16 years of the gross national product in underwriting all the retrenchment packages. Now they appear to be hell-bent on re-inflating the civil service to proportions that promise to exceed what went before. No one up there seems aware of the tenets of Autotelic Bureaucratic Expansionism which, in their basic interpretation, hold that with every senior manager appointed there comes, not the strong possibility but the absolute probability of departmental empire- building.
Given a little time, runaway upsizing will take off like it did before. It may start off gaunt and competent- looking but, because Jack Bureaucrat simply can’t stand eating lean, 10 years from now now it will be spilling over again. It’s called the Bureaucratic Flood Line.
And what with all the “facilitations” and “implementations” and “liaisons”, and the rest of the blather, Jack will be twice as opaque as before.