A review of the city and province’s politicians over the past 15 years reads like the cast of characters in a Carl Hiaasen novel: the musical Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel who liked to lunch with Jurgen Harksen, Niel Barnard and his penchant for spy games and then lately we’ve had Ebrahim Rasool v Mcebisi Skwatsha and Helen Zille v Badih Chabaan.

The big Cape Argus expose.

This contested, murky battleground is a fascinating place to be a political journalist but, as we have seen recently, it is also a dangerous one. The Cape Argus gobsmacked us at the end of June with revelations that Ashley Smith, a reporter for the Argus until he resigned amid a disciplinary enquiry in April 2006, had confessed in an affidavit to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) that he acted as a spindoctor for Rasool, then the Western Cape premier.

Smith told the newspaper he and Joseph Aranes  – then political editor of the paper and who has since resigned from the Argus – used their positions to help Rasool in his campaign against political rivals within the ANC. He also claimed and that the two received money from a public relations company that obtained provincial government contracts. Click here to read the Argus’s remarkable  expose of its former political reporter’s confession and here to read the paper’s front-page editorial that accompanied the story.

Rumours of this skullduggery had been bubbling around for quite some time and the Argus itself first came across the allegations five years ago when members of the Western Cape ANC claimed that two of the paper’s staff members were secretly being paid to write news articles that were favourable to Rasool. Click here to read the Argus’s story run on page 15 of the paper on the same day about the sequence of events over the five years and their attempts to nail down the allegations.

The Argus’s  package made for shocking and utterly compelling reading. If true, this is a serious breach of journalistic ethics and a terminal abuse of the public’s trust in journalism. Not since former City Press editor Vusi Mona, now a spindoctor in the presidency, emerged as a chief player in a bribery scandal in a Mpumalanga court case last year, have we had such skandaal in Media Land.

But I think everyone is agreed that the Argus, which is owned by Independent Newspapers,  played this exactly right. Most hacks – whether they be junior reporters or editors – find that if they apologise sincerely when things go wrong or mistakes are made that the readers are, in fact, quite forgiving.

Under the astute and ethical leadership of Chris Whitfield, a former editor of both the Cape Times and Argus and now editor-in-chief of  both papers plus the Weekend Argus and Daily Voice, the Argus played open cards with its readers to a remarkable degree. The cynical among us might say they had to ‘fess up before another paper got hold of it. In fact, the Mail & Guardian had a stab at it last year based on a set of tape recordings involving Rasool’s successor, Lynne Brown.  Whitfield, however, felt the M&G story – which alleged Argus reporters were being paid cash in brown envelopes –  was on shaky ground factually and the M&G’s ombudsman agreed. (Incidentally, payments of this kind did not come up in Smith’s confession.)

It is clear from the Argus’s own tale of how they finally got to the bottom of the allegations that they made every effort over five years to pursue it and lay their hands on actual evidence of wrong-doing. And in fact, Whitfield told me this week that senior reporter Murray Williams, who authored Wednesday’s front-page story, was put on this investigation six months ago…CLICK HERE TO READ THE INTERVIEW WITH WHITFIELD AT MY REGULAR COLUMN SPOT AT JOURNALISM.CO.ZA

Not very witty, Wilde.

Mr Manuel, we are not amused.

I don’t know if your quip that “we’d all like to be more Catholic than the Pope” in Parliament this week following your admission that buying a R1.2 million BMW for official use was an “error of judgment” got a titter from the Honourable Members but for millions of South Africans, it was shockingly callous. Why don’t you just kick us while we’re down, sir.

Best to keep elitist jokes like that in your own circle. And what a rarified circle it must be, comparing the performance of your luxury vehicles that the Democratic Alliance has revealed has cost the tax payers of this country R45 million this year alone.

But to be fair on our national planning minister, the full quote (after the DA told Parliament that Western Cape Premier Helen Zille ordered that her MECs  to use a pool-car system of second-hand vehicles) was:  “So, we’d all like to be more Catholic than the Pope, and we commend the honourable Zille on having attained that status, but let’s be real about this issue as well”  – referring to the fact that there was no point in returning his BMW because of the loss in value.

Mr Manuel, sir, the citizens of this country know all about being real. Stunning as it may seem to you and your exalted colleagues, we do in fact live in the real world so let me remind you what it’s like.
Let’s take my fairly typical middle class family as an example.  Though many of us would hate to admit, it’s very hard to pay all the bills every month without dipping into our credit cards. Food, electricity, medical aid and school fees just keep going up and up.

You cough up R250 on essential food items and you walk out of Pick ‘n Pay with one bag. My household pays more than R1000 a month in electricity and we have a gas stove and have coughed up to get a solar geyser. There’s very little room to save more except that on power-hungry pool filter and we’re considering filling the pool in next year in the face of rising electricity rates. But then that might be a bad idea, considering our municipality has recently valued our house at R2.6 million despite the fact that we’d be lucky to get R1.4m if we put it on the market.

The rise in the valuation means our monthly rates have leapt from R1200 to about R2200 (though I can’t really tell as it seems to fluctuate). This despite the fact that the municipality can’t pick up the rubbish, cut verges or maintain parks across the city from the plushest suburbs to the townships and squatter camps.
Like many people of my generation, my husband and I support a set of parents financially and the school fees alone  for the two children we support will rise to R30 000 next year – and the older one is at a school with classes of 30 to 35 children so, no, it’s not a particularly good school.

We seldom eat out, do holidays at self-catering joints within a few hours’ drive of our home and on most weekends our recreation involves walking on the beach. We can’t afford a domestic worker and pay for a gardener once a week because we don’t know what he’d do without the money.

There’s not enough money to save for our children’s tertiary education or our retirement  and we have the pleasure of looking forward to the government exerting pressure on the schools we pay a small fortune for to increase class sizes not to mention the government’s ridiculous idea of undermining the private hospitals because the public hospitals are in such an atrocious state.

Like most middle class people, the only consolation is that there are millions more worse off, living in the direst poverty but as far as I can tell the rates and taxes we pay don’t do them a damn bit of good.

A former colleague of mine was in China last year to get married and met a couple of top government officials in Chongqing, for whom the standard official vehicle was a VW Passat – which goes for R290 000 new in this country.  The mayor of a Beijing district (Changping – where the Ming Tombs as well as a famous section of the Great Wall are), he was surprised to discover, drove an old VW Jetta – the box shape, before they became round body shapes.

Now, if ever there was a country today where the top officials can live a lavish lifestyle with no comeback or opposition, it is China.

So no, Mr Manuel, we don’t think you’re funny. And we don’t wish to be more Catholic than the Pope. We want to stop paying more for less and want you and your colleagues to do your jobs honestly and with integrity.

That means not siphoning off our money to family members and friends by corrupting tender systems and, most importantly, with thrift. In the real world, dropping R1.2m of tax payers’ money on a luxury car is just plain wrong – always has been; always will be.

It seems the party handed over documents and details of alleged  ANC skullduggery in Maritzburg (the municipaltiy dished out  R1-million for an event that never happened and then it appears it made its way into ANC coffers). In return for exclusivity, the DA asked  the Sunday Times to credit the party for unearthing the saga.

The paper was hot to trot on the story, reported it, wrote it and even read  the story back to the DA before publishing. Then, at 9pm on Saturday evening, it SMS-d the relevant DA person  to  say the paper was too tight to run the story and they would do so in The Times on Monday.

Good grief, who brought up these people? Where are their manners?

The Times has a much smaller circulation than the Sunday Times and the DA didn’t go to Ray Hartley’s paper — it went to Mondli Makhanya’s paper. Read the whole saga from the DA’s perspective at Moneyweb.

This kind of arrogance doesn’t win you any friends and though there are  a few comments on Moneyweb applauding  the paper  for not wanting to further the DA’s politcial agenda, a deal’s a deal.

Many, many  story leads come from people — political or not — with agendas and  the media needs to be aware of them but there would be very little news if people with axes to grind didn’t run to the press. Ask any hack — the DA (as does the ANC though their leaks tend to emanate from internal power struggles) passes many story leads/ documents/gossip on to the press.

My guess is that the DA won’t be giving too many more story leads to the Sunday Times for a while.

1. For all you online media luvvies out there, My Broadband reports that Colin Daniels, the publisher of  The Times Online, is leaving Avusa for Auto Trader. I hear via the grapevine that Laurice Taitz, the former editor of Sunday Times’s Lifestyle supplement who has been in charge of content there for a few years, has also left recently.

2. Veteran hack Simon Barber, who is now the US country manager for the International Marketing Council, has done an opinion piece for Business Day urging us all to leap to the call by  Joburg tech writer Simon Dingle to say something positive about SA on Twitter with the hashtag #SAis. Some shiny, happy people have already got tweeting after Dingle’s call on Radio 702. Read them in Barber’s piece here. Call me cynical but I have to say there’s something a tad pathetic  about the Good News Brigade, like that ridiculous website South Africa: The Good News. I think in a developing nation,  you’ve got to take the good with the bad because there are a lot of bad things  happening to people out there beyond the suburbs.

3. IOL  has a peculiar story about Gauteng MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, who bought a Mercedes-Benz ML 63 AMG for just under a R1-million from a dealership and is now being investigated for theft. It appears to be a weird mix-up as the car was registered to one of the directors of the Alberton dealership. But it does beg the question how can an MEC justify buying a car worth the price of a middle-class home with government money? Get yourself a Getz, lady! Read the story here.

4. DA leader Helen Zille appears to have backed down a bit on her all-male cabinet and admitted she made an error, which the ANC has welcomed. Read the story at News24 here.

5. And Moneyweb has a cool Reuters story up on its site about tomorrow’s “tech titans”, the young ‘uns with the big ideas that could become tomorrow’s tycoons (and pics of each one, many of whom are still teens). Nice presentation, guys, you just forgot the border abound the pics. Click here to go there.

2. Zuma’s spokesman says that his wives are all equal and he hasn’t made a choice about first lady. Read the story here at The Times.

He hasn’t decided that only one is the first lady. He will decide at any given time who will go with him. He may go with all three of them.

That will make for a jolly little tea party with Ms Clinton, when Team Zuma go to Washington.

3. It’s official — we’re in recession. But if you’re thinking state spending will get us out of it, then read this opinion piece by Business Day. It turns out that state spedning is already the chief ingredient to growth, with yesterday’s figures from Stats SA showing  construction, government services and personal services is being supported by the official purse.

4. There are a few companies doing well out of our straightened circumstances. Mr Price has reported a  24% increase in  clothing sales to R4.5-billion for the year to the end of March as consuners are shopping more at the cheaper end of the market. The chain store has opened 58 new stornes in this period but also said even they were expecting  the year ahead to be “challenging”. Read the IOL story here.

5. And talking about the economy, here’s an excellent piece by veteran reporter Hilary Joffe at Business Day anaylsing Eskom’s application for a 34% tarriff increase. Read it and you’ll see why there no reason for the public to pay for the parastatal’s need to invest in new infrastructure. Here’s one fact that staggered me: The R60-billion the government is giving Eskom this year is the first equity injection from the state  since Eskom was established in 1923!

1. If you’ve been wondering what our former president, Thabo Mbeki, is up to these days,  he turned up as a  last-minute guest at a student meeting at Rhodes. He was by all accounts thoroughly charming and affable and even joked about a former Lovedale teacher who had a penchant for gin in a science beaker. Who turned out to be the grandfather of one of the students! Clearly,  the pressure’s off now that he’s not the Pres and he’s back to charming pre-presidency Mbeki! Read the Dispatch story here.

2. DA leader Helen Zille is under fire by the ANC again as she’s scheduled her state of the province address for Friday — before President Jacob Zuma delivers his state of the nation speech next week. This is a breach of protocol, says the government, so things are sure to get even nastier than they are between the ANC and DA. Read The Times story here.

3. The Times also reports that a doccie on political satire, which the SABC pulled  just before elections last month, will be on tonight on Special Assignment on SABC3 at 9.30pm. Click here to view a video interview with cartoonsit Zapiro at The Times. Zapiro’s work is featured in the show.

4. IOL has a handy rundown on President Jacob Zuma’s political appointments, who will advise him on his policy drive. Click here to go to the story.

5. Business Day reports that Cosatu will meet government ministers on the sidelines of a cabinet pow-wow tomorrow to try resolve an impasse over civil servants’ pay. Read the story here.

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In a really fascinating — and exceptionally well written — interview with The Guardian newspaper, the Arch says:

It’s water under the bridge. It’s the new reality. He’s been inaugurated. He’s appointed a new cabinet. Let’s see what happens. At this stage, I am perhaps neutral… I’m sad for my country. I think we could have done a great deal better in the way that we handled the differences… But then, politics is politics, and we have to live with these realities as they are.

So now it’s only DA leader Helen Zille swimming upstream and, I do think that any hopes by the DA’s leader in Parliament, Athol Trollip, that the opposition have a contructive relationship with the ANC have been scuppered completley. Witness the ANC refusing to give the DA any chairmanships of  Parliament’s portoflio committees. Ouch. That’s got to hurt and even the affable Trollip must have cursed (colourfully in Xhosa) under his breath when that came out last week.
The Tutu interview is long but well worth a read and a fascinating insight into the man most South Africans adore. It also appears that the Arch has written a children’s book called “God’s Dream” published by Walker Books in the UK. The message of the book is that we are all God’s children no matter what our differences but is not, apparently, a bible puncher. Click here to go to Walker Book’s info page about it.

Yesterday I heard Twitter fan Gareth Cliff at 5fm do the news headlines in 140 character each a la Twitter. This took my fancy  so I’m trying it out today too.  And no need to sit and count the letters as i popped them in Tweetdeck first.

1. Hlophe ‘s lawyers takes potshot at Bizos and claims JSC is biased.  Judge gives parties till Friday to make further submissions. Click here

2. Foreign investors ask Zuma to clarify position on investment climate after Cosatu tried to stop Vodacom listing at last minute. Click here

3. Zuma should fire Icasa bigwigs for incompetance for their role in Vodacom fiasco, say SA analysts. Quite right! Click here.

4. DA’s new parliament leader distances himself from Zille’s attacks on Zuma, saying the president is a warm-blooded South African. Click here

5. CNN hack Richard Quest has left our shores to discover a leak had flooded a neighbour’s apartment and everyone is blaming every one else.

1. Here’s a perfect example of plonkonomics at work: The M&G has a business story saying that SABMiller says that South Africans are drinking cheaper beer brands and are partying more in their own homes — rather than in the pub. This has emerged in the brewing giant’s  preliminary results for the 12 months to March 31. Click here to read the story and pass me another Black Label from the cooler box.

2. The Witness in Maritzburg has an interesting crime story today. A KZN Midlands farmer was ambushed and killed  in what is believed to be a hit related to a land claims dispute. Read the full story here.

3.  Talk about adrenaline junkies. SA’s only microlight formation flying team will produce a first for the country when they take to the skies at the  Rand Airshow on Sunday at sunset — with fireworks. Read the story at The Times here. Nothing like doing flips in a flying bicycle packed with incendiary goods to pump the nads.

4. And on to more serious matters. Not! DA leader Helen Zille says her  all-male Western Cape cabinet is here to stay because she is not interested in “50-50 bean counting”. I’m with you on this one Helen. I think most womenfolk  — except that odd anacronysm, the ANC Women’s League — have moved beyond demanding skirts in power for their own sake. Read The Times story here.

5. And the Dalai Lama is now apparently welcome to visit South Africa except this is probably the last place on earth — except Beijing — he wants to swan off to, methinks.

1. News24 says that in court papers filed by former president Thabo Mbeki he admits he tried to delay the arrest of suspended police chief Jackie Selebi to give him time to prepare the country for the arrest. Read the story here.

2. Meanwhile The Times  reports that KZN politicos are abuzz with speculation that the natty ANC heavyweight Bheki Cele may soon be made the new national police commissioner. Read the story here.

3. Up for a stroll in quiet, landscaped gardens? The Dispatch has quite a story about holes in the perimiter wall of an East London medium security prison that allows memebrs of the public to slip through and wonder the prison grounds (and possibly inmates on gardening duty to escape).  Click here and have a look at the pics of people caught in the act!

4. The Human Rights Commission has said Enough already, children, after the political mud-slinging between DA leader Helen Zille and the ANC, saying: “The country does not need this right now.” Nuff said. Read the IOL story here.

5. The twit in space, Astro_Mike, passed by another satellite that allows him to send his once-a-day Twitter to earth. “Getting more accustomed to living in space today and getting ready for our big rendezvous with hubble,” says the astronaut. Not much of a sense of humour, this guy. What we want to hear is: “Having aliens for lunch.”