A letter from Inkatha Freedom Party Youth Brigade national organiser PC Mashego to the manager of Standard Bank’s Simmonds Street (Jozi) branch was inexplicably delivered to the doors of the Dorsbult Bar.
It reads: ”How was a decision reached to install an ATM facility inside the premises of a political organisation in Plein Street — Shell House? What steps are you taking to avoid any form of detriment to other concerned and interested parties?”
And the question that had Lemmer almost spilling his Klipdrift with laughter: ”How much is the bank paying the African National Congress a month? And how much have you paid so far?”
Who you gonna call?
Pity new poor Sowetan editor John Dludlu, who walked into his first day on the job this week to face a barrage of complaints from staff who had just been issued with a directive from MD Mike Tissong barring them from calling their contacts on cellphones.
As part of his attempts to cut costs and please ultimate chief Saki Macozoma, Tissong (who has a spectacularly insignificant past as a journalist on The Star before moving into management) told staff they could dial only landline numbers from now on. Tissong obviously spent his newsroom days in the pre-cellphone era — and the pre-Internet era, it seems, as he has also consistently refused to give hacks access to the World Wide Web and insists there’s no need for a laser printer in the paper’s newsroom for journalists to print out their own stories.
Dludlu must be thinking about frying pans and fires. He fled his post as deputy editor at Business Day to escape the ravings of Peter Bruce, only to find himself in the most under-resourced newsroom in town — with the added threat of a rival paper being launched soon by Naspers. That’s not to mention the so-called ”relaunch” of the Sowetan in February, which splashed a new coat of paint on the paper’s tired old reportage — and has reportedly lost the paper thousands of readers.
Oom Krisjan and the rest of the Dorsbult regulars would love to give Dludlu a call to wish him alles van die beste, but we have his cellphone number only …
Idolatry
Lemmer has been watching the Idols bake-a-pop-tart contest and its coverage by Totally Dependent Newspapers with some amusement. Tony O’Reilly’s stable seems a little confused about how to cover the show. An editorial in The Sunday Independent had some harsh things to say about the imbecility of the talent hunt, but the same issue featured Idols on the cover of its lifestyle magazine. They must have been happy to get a winner called Heinz, though.
Birthday bash
The manne of the Dorsbult could open a fish-and-chips shop with the amount of extra newsprint that’s been flooding the bar in the past few weeks. Not only have there been endless soccer ”specials”, but the past couple of days have been rich with commemorative issues.
For once, Oom Krisjan is at a loss for words to describe the hagiographic Mbeki @ 60 supplement produced by Sour Street to commemorate Thabo’s verjaars-dag. Instead we’ll just wish the president veels geluk, many more birthdays, but much less sycophancy. Personally, Lemmer would prefer Marilyn Monroe singing.
Even more bizarre was the Gauteng provincial government’s Youth Day insert in Sunday World. On the cover, next to Sam Nzima’s definitive June 16 1976 photograph, it says: ”Hector Peterson [sic] Fun Run”.
Danse macabre
Oom Krisjan was fascinated by the SABC3 televison news last Friday when, immediately after coverage of the Peter Mokaba funeral, it broadcast an item about another brutal farm murder. With such subtle juxtaposition was this the SABC’s personal tribute to the author of ”Kill the farmer, kill the Boer”?
Saturday’s SABCnews.com continued the trend: ”Mourners at the funeral of Peter Mokaba, a former ANC MP, chanted his revolutionary slogan. ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer’, every time speakers stood up to praise their fallen hero. All agreed it was not a day to cry but to recall the good memories Mokaba left behind.”
Absolut Winkie
Last Saturday a moral regeneration summit was held at Oranje Meisieskool, Bloemfontein, as part of the build-up to Youth Day. But mixed messages were sent to the pupils who pitched up.
Firstly, the event was opened by the Pretoria Police Band playing, among other tunes, Afroman’s Because I Got High, all about a guy who smokes all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
Then the keynote address was by the Premier of the Free State, Winkie Direko. A lot of her speech was about how youth must avoid drugs and alcohol, which was a good message, but the bit Lemmer loves was when she talked about corruption. Direko said: ”Corruption is absolutely, absolutely — and I say absolutely with a capital E — unacceptable.”
Mexaiku
Sport can be poetry in motion — and on the page. The Guardian‘s Paul MacInnes wrote this haiku for Mexico at the World Cup:
You were my brillest
Then the Yanks gave it you large
I should have kept quiet
In honour of the final next week, Oom Krisjan asks readers to submit any World Cup soccer haikus — the best will be printed in this column.
Readers wishing to alert Oom Krisjan to matters of national or lesser importance can do so by clicking on the link below.