We are, most of us in this fair land, subjects of the AbaThembu kingdom – according to a declaration of secession presented to Parliament recently.

If this comes as a surprise to the good folk of KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Northern Cape and parts of Gauteng and the Free State – who are all claimed as part of the independent AbaThembu kingdom – it’s been a hugely compelling issue in the Eastern Cape recently, not least for the AbaThembus whose most famous son is Nelson Mandela.

It’s been an amusing topic of discussion in the Eastern part of the province and, for the past month, the letters pages of the East London-based Daily Dispatch newspaper have been filled with strident views on the secession attempt and its apparent leader, King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo.

Talk of secession, whether it comes from Texas or the Isle of White, is compelling in today’s world as it seems so loony. And Dalindyebo, who is Mandela’s clan nephew, is a colourful and controversial figure of the first order. He has a talent for dramatic gesture and has made headlines for years, from public spats with the Matanzimas over who is the rightful AbaThembu king to claiming in court papers that Mandela led an ANC coup to unseat him in 2002.

However, Dalindyebo is also a very influential traditional leader. Not only are the AbaThembus an important Xhosa royal family, but the king has political blue blood as Dalindyebo’s father, Sabata, chose exile over the apartheid government’s Bantustan policy. King Sabata Dalindyebo, after whom the Mthatha  municipal area is named, was no National Party stooge.

The fact that it took about a decade to bring the current king to trial in the Mthatha High Court last year for a raft of serious crimes – including kidnapping, culpable homicide, arson and assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm – shows just how influential he is.

Dalindyebo was sentenced in October last year to 15 years for his crimes. They included ordering in 1995 that one of his subjects be beaten up as well as ordering the kidnapping of a mother and her children after the woman’s husband failed to pay a fine Dalindyebo had given him.
Then in December Votani Majola, Dalindyebo’s lawyer and head of The King Dalindyebo Justice Task Team, demanded that the state compensate the AbaThembu nation R80-billion and the royal family R900-million for the humiliation suffered as a result of Dalindyebo’s criminal conviction. Failure to do so would result in the nation seceding, charged Majola.

Majola served notice on President Jacob Zuma’s office and the National Prosecuting Authority about the intention to secede and then, on January 14, a declaration of secession was given to Parliament. Parliament has confirmed it has received the declaration but said it was not sure such an issue fell within its jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Majola  threw down the gauntlet and told the Daily Dispatch last month: “I served the notice on 14 January. We have officially cut ties with South Africa and we are no longer South African.”

Dalindyebo is a wily political player and has been careful to make no pronouncements on the issue but his spokesperson, Phumla Matshaya, has confirmed that the king was aware that Majola had served notice on Parliament. “Votani  is working with us,” said Matshaya. “He has done his research. He is not a crazy man and he got his act together.”

Well, we AbaThembu subjects are relieved to hear the good lawyer is not completely potty. But there are serious questions raised by this peculiar turn of events. Is this a looming constitutional crisis or is   Dalindyebo South Africa’s answer to Mad King George? And how should the government and the ANC respond?
It must certainly be embarrassing to Zuma and the ANC’s national leaders, who have always treaded softly around the Eastern Cape kings. The Eastern Cape is the ANC’s historical and political heartland and the ANC’s OR Tambo region – which encompasses Mthatha – is the party’s biggest voting region. Further, Zuma went out of his way to court the traditional leaders of the region prior to being elected ANC president in 2008 and the 2009 national election.

My guess is that this a tricky little hot potato that no one wants to react to officially.  The presidency referred me to the  Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs on the matter. The Dispatch reported  that  that department stated it would intervene only if Dalindyebo approached it.
Until now the king’s chief advisers have distanced themselves from Majola’s claims.

At a  meeting – that included the king and Patekile Holomisa, the president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa – of AbaThembu leaders and ordinary people at the king’s Bumbane Great Place in Mthatha two weeks ago,  a decision was taken to help find funding for the king’s appeal against his convictions but the issue of secession was not discussed.

The media were barred from the meeting but Holomisa said afterwards that the issue of secession would be discussed at another meeting scheduled for later in February.

The Johannesburg-based Majola told me that he was not at the meeting but he would proceed with the secession process. “Secession was decided as early as December…The issue of secession is on and we are continuing to proceed,” he said, adding that his task team wanted the process to be peaceful.

Majola said that his task team were in the process of consulting the people on the ground in the Transkei and, after that, the next step would be formal engagement with the government. Provinces such as the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal were included in the claim, he said, because these were the pre-colonial lands of the AbaThembu.

Bantu Holomisa, the leader of the United Democratic Movement and one-time leader of the Transkei homeland, said Transkeians will not take this seriously until they are consulted on the matter. But he also believed that Zuma and the ANC national leaders must be shocked and embarrassed by the turn of events from such a prominent king.

The ANC is probably using its influence on the ground to put a halt to the secession attempt, says Bantu Holomisa, so the upshot of the today’s meeting will be intriguing.

There are those who believe that this is a serious issue. Pierre de Vos, a law professor at the University of Western Cape who runs a successful blog, has warned that if the king and his lawyer act on the threat in anyway, they could be charged with treason. “There is always a thin line between expressing a wish and acting on a wish,” De Vos told the Dispatch.  “Once they start encouraging people to be disobedient towards the state they will be threatening the security of the state.”

However, Professor Stephen Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, says that in the practical world of politics, Dalindyebo is not going to be tried for treason.

Whatever the outcome of the meeting later this month, we can be certain that Dalindyebo is not going to step quietly off the stage. He has been granted leave to appeal his sentence and the Mthatha High Court has also granted the state leave to appeal the sentence on a culpable homicide charge – so it can up the charge to murder.

It seems Dalindyebo is determined to use everything in his arsenal to avoid a jail term so the ANC government hasn’t seen the last of the troublesome king.

* A version of this article appeared frist in Business Day.

* See also the Dispatch report on one of its reporters receiving threatening phone calls over the secession story.

Popularity: 9% [?]

So the Grubstreet gal has a very smart buddy, Andrew Mogridge, with whom I have collaborated on a three-minute documentary about Enon, a little-known village near Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape that started life as a  Moravian mission station in 1816.

I came across the little village while I was on the Daily Dispatch @Venture project last year and was struck by the neat but quite poor little village in the back of beyond (it’s on the way to nowhere in particular), its beautiful Moravian church and the fact that it has a brass band, a hallmark of the Moravian church service. The people of Enon were the original farm workers on the citrus farms of the area and, indeed, still do itinerant labour on these farms.

But time was pressing and the @Venture team I was leading had a date to ride elephants in the Zuurberg Mountains in the nearby Greater Addo National Park.

I’ve always regretted not being able to spend more time in Enon and when Andrew Mogridge and his savvy team of web designers at Mogridge Design in East London, mentioned they wanted to experiment with video and making doccies, Enon sprang to mind.

And so Andrew and a couple his fellow band members (he’s also a talented musician and fine artist), who are fluent in Afrikaans, headed off to Enon for a weekend and interviewed the Enon pastor, Rev  Heflin Houlie, and some of villagers. They also filmed them singing and playing music. We realised that this is a remarkable little community, which has survived against the odds, and what holds it together is a love of music and the church, which is in daily use.

Andrew did some very elegant editing and I contributed to the framing of the story. Attention spans being so short on the web, we decided to make it three minutes in length, which turned out to be a real challenge. Three minutes is not very long  when you want to tell a story in film and you’ve got hours of footage from which to choose.

Andrew and I also argued over one point. I was adamant that the doccie needed a voice over. It was the news hack in me. How can we tell a story without words? Andrew (being an artist at heart) didn’t want a voice over and felt the music and editing itself could tell the story. Well, blow me down, he came up with a rough edit  and it worked! Brilliantly, if I say so myself!

So here it is. A first venture into the world of film and video. WATCH THIS SPACE AS THERE WILL BE MORE! We’d love to hear your comments, dislikes and likes, and any advice you might have.  We’ve also entered it into a Channel 4 (the British TV channel) competition called “3 Minute Wonder” for three-minute doccies so if the spirit moves you, we’d love you to vote for “Enon – A place of song” here. Enjoy!

Click here to go to Mogridge Design (which also gives Grubstreet free office space, bless them) to see what else they do, including Andrew’s art and his band’s music.

Popularity: 17% [?]

At the opening of East London’s new mega-mall last month, I couldn’t help noticing that few people paid much attention to a speech by the province’s finance MEC, Mcebisi Jonas. And it wasn’t because they were being rude as everybody had listened closely to the speech before, from the hugely respected BEE developer and home boy Sisa Ngebulana.

Jonas is no stranger to controversy and had the gall to start his speech by saying something along the lines of “When I was asked to speak at the opening, I didn’t want to…” (now that’s how you win friends and influence people). But as the decision-makers of the Eastern Cape, such as they, tucked into the canapes and chatted away in a desultory fashion throuhg the MEC’s address, it got me thinking about how South Africans view our leaders.

The record turn-out in the April national election and whopper of an endorsement for the ANC surpirsed many — myself included, especially here in the Eastern Cape. Sure, it’s the ANC’s historical heartland but the vast majority of Eastern Capers in townships and the rural areas have also been largely abandoned by their ANC leaders. Clinics, schools and housing are in a shocking state and the Bhisho’s bigwigs continue to mismanage, look after their buddies through dodgy tenders and siphon off taxpayers’ money. Hell, even the quality of the water in this poor benighted province is going to the dogs — and if you can’t even deliver clean water to your citizens, what can you do?

I personally thought Cope would do much better than it did in the national poll in the Eastern Cape though, all told, the party did well for its first time at the stumps and it is now the province’s official opposition. The DA lost ground as did the UDM and the PAC;  the ANC still has an overwhleming majortiy in the provincial legislature.

But then, there’s the 2011 local government elections to come and I wonder if that’s where we will see the real shift. The local East London paper, the Daily Dispatch, has been running a series of what they call “Dispatch Dialogues” over the past year and the ordinary folk who turn up, black, coloured and white, are gatvol of their local authorities and are demanding better services.

My feeling is that the vast majority of ordinary South Africans – and by that I mean the millions of people in the townships and rural areas – see the ANC national government as something far away, emblematic of their decades of struggle for democracy but essentially meaningless to their worlds. Voting for the country’s president is akin to voting for an Idols contestant, methinks.

Provincial government is one step closer but also difficult to access and to influence but when it come to your local municipality and ward councillors, that’s what people really care about. Bring on 2011, I say.

Popularity: 6% [?]

BY MIKE LOEWE

The sun was out and the attitude was right. She needed the beach and Saturday was blue.

Grahamstown can be interminable on weekends. Dunno why because I love this place. It has a wonderful way of handling time – all those seasons and moods and switches. Just sometimes, you get to Sunday night and think: “Is that it?”

But this Saturday just said: “Beach!”

Simple sun worshipping. Unselfconscious. Real. Pic: Mike Loewe

You get people who are launching their rubber ducks into the dawn ready for a day of splendour. And you get those who launch their cars onto the freeway at noon, having visited the community market, dropped a child, spoken to moms, resolved little niggling, banal issues that just won’t let you go to the beach…

But the attitude was good, so armed with FooDude’s R20-a-slice baklava, plus shortbread and beetroot relish, and one teen, we happily puttered towards Kenton. I was resolved and at peace. No surfing today. Just swimming.

Tant Hettie’s farm stall on the vlakte above Salem is famous for two cyclists bonking (remember, it means getting tired, vulnerable and unable to continue) and only one of them calling home for a pick-up! (But they both took it, and we move on…)

Now it was my time to explore the store. Rushed into her darkened garage with its ancient shelves and single fridge. What would she look like? My late aunty Esme!

Her ginger beer is awesome, and with arms jammed with jars, we left this single-looking senior in her little house under giant gums and stopped only to look at rhinos a few kays outside Kenton.

A bit of faffing around (Mermaid beach is not the same as Aviator Girl’s cove) and we arrive.

The tide is in, such a wide shallow expanse of water. Easterly churn has turned it cold, but the sand is warm (not burny) and we make our way to the corner.

Daughter is delighted, but screeches as we wobble our way into the olive-coloured deep channel and we do that heart-pumping rush across (just in case a raggy decides to cruise the bay) and we are out in the ocean, on the flats. Exposed.

She goes in to the waist (familiar?) and stretches out on the sand, hat over head, in her styling, sporty black one-piece into that combo of intense light without the roasting.

Another family joins us. The beach is otherwise empty. And did I say vast?

We let the sun onto our pale skin. Not too long, because the next door Yorky runs up and snaffles into She’s hat-covered face!

Just an hour or so hanging out on this shoreline where earth and sea create endless energy and we’re peckish. (Later we’ll eat at Ocean Basket in Port Alfred on the banks of the Kowie. A treat.)

As we mosey along towards car, there is this remarkable sight.

A woman in full beachy outfit, slacks, blouse, hat, shoes. She should be upright, but has chosen to lie flat on the sand, stretched in full repose with that vista of hills and water in the background.

Simple sun worshipping. Unselfconscious. Real.

Great attitude.

* Mike Loewe is the editor of   Makana Moon, a quirky community paper in Grahamstown. Click here to check it out on the web.

Popularity: 13% [?]

by Dave Macgregor

The smoking life. This is not Dave Macgregor...he has a goat

I met god – with a little “g” – three months ago when I decided to finally kick a butt burning addiction that has cost me thousands of Rands over the past 25 years.
An average of 20 ciggies a day, 365 and a quarter days a year for 25 years, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize how much I have wasted since I sucked my first “cancer stick” – long before I even started shaving.
What the hell…I would have could have should have been a tycoon if I did not spend hundreds of thousands of hard earned clams on puffing.

Nobody held a gun to my head and – yes – I did know every smoke was “another nail in your coffin.”

But still I puffed.

I convinced myself I was so hooked, I would literally walk miles to buy some twak – no matter how poor I was – always fearing that if I did not get my nicotine fix I would climb walls.

Or so I thought.

It was so bad, I would be reaching for my smokes and lighting up – even before I realized what I was doing.

Before going to bed every night, I would make sure I had at least two “skyfs” left for the morning, one with a cup of mocca java – cos everybody knows it “tastes better” like that.

What a joke.

I found that all out during a five hour quit smoking session with god with a little “g” – taking a puff break every 30 minutes, nogal.

If a friend of mine could kick her 80 a day habit with god with a little “g” I could nail down my much smaller addiction.

Five hours later I realized how much smoking really sucked and stopped.

After huffing and puffing my way through 25 years of my life, the past three months have been the best.

Hooked as a teenager, 90 days after I had my last smoke I am slowly starting to feel like a teenager again as my lungs get to grips with some fresh air for a change.

Pity about the prune faced wrinkles I got from sucking on a million smokes or more though…

The hacking morning cough has gone; the wheezing before falling asleep is not as audible as before and I can hike up hills without huffing and puffing.

The body is slowly adjusting to being given a second chance at life.

For years Malcolm Robinson was just another surfing buddy – who also smoked 30 plus a day.

Now he is “Little g”.

After several failed attempts to quit, Malcolm stumbled on Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop smoking last year and is fast becoming a give-it-up guru.

Endorsed by major medical aid companies – with a money back guarantee if it does not work after three tries – I kicked it on the first attempt.

Not using any “nicotine substitutes” – like patches or sprays – or hypnotherapy, it is the sheer simplicity of the message that breaks down all the myths associated with smoking.

No shock tactics no horror pictures of tarred up lungs – just common sense.

I always thought I was hopelessly addicted until it was pointed out to me if it was so bad – how could I get eight solid hours of sleep a night?

Bingo.

A few more chirps like that and I did not want to smoke.

Eureka.

I now know coffee tastes much better without a smoke. A few puffs after a meal do not bring out the flavour.

“Little g” got hold of me and I really woke up and smelt the coffee…and really tasted my food

Forget the Iluminati and other conspiracy theories – the biggest hoax are the myths associated with smoking.

The joke is on us.

Sex may seem better after a smoke, but try kissing a mouth after 25 of those suckers and you will know what I mean.

I believed it all – until Malcom started his shpeel.

Every myth was met with a logical explanation and the smoke breaks started seeming a little pointless.

And, as promised I am not a miserable sod – even during the first week.

Nowdays my friends say that I am glowing. I can stand in a smoky room and not feel like a puff. I also do not feel like public enemy number 1.

Billed the “number one smoking cessation method in the world” – I have little reason to disagree.

When my son came home from school in tears after being shown the lungs of smokers – I knew I had to quit.

Thanks “Little g”

* Dave Macgregor is the wayward, surfing and butt-kicking correspondent for the Daily Dispatch in Port Alfred. He is also famous for adopting a goat while on a newspaper travel trip

Popularity: 13% [?]

I’ve been knocking around my old student haunt of Grahamstown this weekend on the outskirts of the Highway Africa conference as well as doing a bit of schmoozing. I had a chance to have a brief chat to New York Times investigative reporter Ron Nixon, who is also one of the brains behind a really interesting new website launched to help investigative reporting in Africa. The site’s called the Ujima Project and is well worth a look.

The Ujima Project puts Africa under the magnifying glass

So what’s it about?

Well, the founders of the site are trying to help us hacks here in Africa to access information which our governments generally don’t like us to get access too. The problems for our governments, however, is that there is an enormous amount of important information available in the US about other governments’ activities and the activities of foreign companies doing business or lobbying in the United States.

It is this information that Ron and his colleagues have put together in a wonderfully easily searchable form for journalists to access. The Ujima Project is a joint venture between the nonprofit Great Lakes Media Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors
I’m hoping to do a full interview with Ron about the site and the background behind it but while I get around to that let me show you some of the gems available on the Ujima.

Check out this record, for example, produced on a search for weapons sales from the US to South Africa.

Now, how intriguing. What on earth would South Africa be doing making such a purchase in 2007 and what specifically are these toxicological agents that it might be purchasing and for what purpose? And reporters out there want to pick up on this one?

Or this one – probably satellite parts of something, but intriguing nevertheless.

You can also dig around and find other fascinating information. Every foreign company involved in any lobbying or other activities in the US has to register with the US Justice Department and disclose their activities and the money involved. This apparently goes back to the Second World War when a Nazi Party front company was getting up to some nefarious activities in the US. The result, more than 50 years, later is that there is a ton of information available about SA companies activities in the States. Go and have a look.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The blogosphere is thumping with chutzpah – creative people who decided to go it alone online, usually with no money.
Grubstreet is interviewing three very different, successful bloggers – Nigel Louw, Michael Trapido and Seth Rotherham – to find out the secret of their success. You’ve seen them moving up the Amatomu rankings and here’s the people behind the blog.

Daily Dispatch photographer and fisherman Nigel Louw started his blog, Fishing the Eastern Cape, in October last year and it has been quietly climbing up the Amatomu rankings. It is now hovering around the number 50 mark and gets about 9 500 visits a month and 3 300 unique users with people spending an average time of more than five minutes on the blog. There are more than 300 registered users on the blog.
The time spent on the blog is pretty impressive and what Louw has really got right is getting users to come up with loads of content for him.

QUESTION: So you’re risen up the Amatomu (blog aggregation) ranks slowly but steadily to around number 50 (most popular in

What a lot of cob... Nigel Louw with one of his catches.

South Africa). What’s the secret, do you think?
ANSWER: Probably just keeping the content going – you’ve got to have stuff going up every day or every second day and I’ve managed to get the guys to submit their catches, which hasn’t worked on a lot of other sites. Also, I’ve had a local (fishing) shop sponsoring a prize every month so I get the guys to post catches and the best one wins. It changes every month so this month it was steenbras and the best catch won a rod worth R800. This keeps the guys posting and I’ve got other shops coming on board now.
If there’s days when I don’t get fish coming in, then I try do a bit of research and write about how to catch a certain type of fish, for instance.
Q. In the beginning, it must have been relentless because you must have been doing all the posting?
A. It started off with the basic design and I had to go fishing often, catch a cob and upload it, catch another fish and upload it. Then I think I told friends about it and eventually some guys I didn’t know started coming onto the site and they told their friends… I also made an advert about the size of a business card and left them at counters in fishing shops and put posters up.
Q. Was it hard to fit it in with a full-time job?
A. Ja, it was long hours at work and then you get home, and it’s long hours again. Lately I can get away with working on my blog till about 10pm but when you redesign the site, sometime you can sit up till 1am trying to get it right.
Q. I presume you’re using Wordpress (blogging platform). Did you teach yourself?
A. I asked my brother (a graphic designer) a couple of questions in the beginning but then I figured it out by myself.
Q. Was it difficult teaching yourself?
A. It didn’t take that long as I’d worked on a photo website when I lived in the UK. I think if you have no background in websites or blogging, it will take a while in the beginning but Wordpress is pretty user friendly. It’s got a nice back end. It’s not like you’ve got to do everything in coding.
Q. Your site’s looking quite slick.
A. I just widened it the other day so that there’s more ad space. I’m hoping to get some ads. I don’t make any money out of the blog yet but you’ve got to try.
Q. Not yet?
A. The only money is through Adgator (the ads wing of blog aggregator Afrigator). Google ads are a bit crappy. You don’t make money out of them… But I’ve been visiting a few shops again recently as my stats are quite good now.
Q. When you started the blog, were you aiming to make any money out of it or was it just a hobby?
A. Any money I make out of the site goes back into it. I started it because I love fishing and thought I’d get more involved in the fishing community… On a public holiday a while back, I had a mini members outing and there were about 14 of us… some drove from Port Alfred for it so I guess I’m getting a bit of a following. It’s also good to learn blogging and design. I’m pretty confident with it now.
Q. Who would your competitors be?
A. There isn’t much out there. That’s why I started my blog. There’s Sealine and that’s just really a forum. And there’s the ESA website but it doesn’t get updated as often as mine does.
Q. So where do you want to go with your blog?
A. I want it to become the first stop for fishermen in the Eastern Cape, for example, if someone’s going fishing in Mazeppa Bay, they can come to my website and find accommodation, whether its hotels or holiday shacks. Then they’ll be able to look under Mazeppa Bay fishing spots and see what’s been caught there lately and know what to take and to target. I tried to get accommodation (advertising) on the blog when it was three months old but it was too new and I didn’t have the stats so I’ll try again.

Go to Louw’s blog, Fishing the Eastern Cape, here.

Popularity: 22% [?]

The animosity between the ANC and the DA is growing and, with party leader Helen Zille’s breach of protocol (she’s scheduled her state of the province address before President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address), it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. (Click here to read The Times story on the latest spat.)

Last week, Grubstreet spoke to the DA’s leader in Parliament, Athol Trollip, who made headlines when he said Zuma should be treated with the respect that his office confers on him.

Trollip, who surprised many when he beat DA strategist Ryan Coetzee to the caucus leader’s job, is an Eastern Cape farmer who is known for his affable and collaborative style. Looks like he’s going to have his hands full in his desire to build a constructive relationship with the ANC.

Athol Trollip

“Anger very often clouds sanity,” Trollip said. “What I’ve been trying to instill in my colleagues at a provincial level and will continue to do so at a national level is to make sure we don’t try to engage the ANC is a shouting contest. Seventy-seven (DA) members will never be able to outshout 264 ANC members.

“I believe that we can do much more than being an opposition in Parliament, where one is typecast as antagonistic and politicking with the ANC. There is a place for it but I am a proponent of political engagement in the plenaries in Parliament… We will be an effective, critical opposition — where the ANC falls down and cannot deliver on (election) promises, we will expose that and come with an alternative that will make government more effective. ”

Those who know him from the Eastern Cape say Trollip will do the DA a lot of good in Parliament as because he grew up speaking Xhosa in rural Eastern Cape, he understands traditional African etiquette that the top people of the ANC appreciate: you can be forthright but polite; there’s no need to shout.

“It would come out very clearly when he addressed the premier,” said Zingisile Mkabile, the former Pan Africanist Congress leader in the Eastern Cape who has since left politics. “He has some understanding of African values in terms of respect… And having operated in the Eastern Cape, I think his approach will be different compared to those who come from the Western Cape or Gauteng, where the DA is much stronger. The opposition parties were overwhelmed by the ANC in the Eastern Cape so you had to find a way of navigating through that territory.”

It was in his new role as spokesman on the presidency that Trollip characterised Zuma as a fallible, “warm-blooded” South African that was read by some as contrary to Zille’s pronouncements on the president. In a letter last week to The Times newspaper, which reported Trollip’s statements at the Cape Town Press Club under the headline “Top DA man’s attack on Zille”, he denied distancing himself from Zille in any “shape or form”. (Click here to read The Times story that caused the mini media storm.)

He told Grubstreet that he thought the headline did not reflect the report or his statements. He says both Zille and he respect Zuma as the country’s president — a sentiment, he says, that has not been returned by the ANC for Zille’s position as premier of the Western Cape.

The DA is the most media savvy of all the parties and when asked if the strategy may be to project the Trollip and Zille as “good cop, bad cop”, Trollip smacked it down.

“It just shows you a week is a long time in politics because a week ago Helen was the darling of the media and the public. I think it’s a very funny question and I don’t want to be contemptuous about it,” he said.

“I believe I was elected on the strengths I bring to the caucus and not because I would be a balancing act for Helen. And I don’t believe she’s a bad cop. I believe she is an incredibly good cop and the reason why people saying she is being aggressive, you must understand the kind of onslaught she’s under (from the ANC Youth League and MK veterans).”

Trollip may be known for his collaborative style but Bobby Stevenson, who has taken over as the DA’s leader in the Eastern Cape legislature, said: “I think it’s wrong to say he’s not confrontational. He’s not afraid to call a spade a spade or point out any failures of government. I think he doesn’t personalise politics. He doesn’t get personal. He sticks to the issues – that’s his style.”

Click here to read a Q&A with Trollip I did for the Dispatch in 2007 when he campaigned for the top job in the DA and lost to Zille.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Five things you need to know about SA today

1. This is top of the pops today! The Dispatch’s wayward Port Alfred correspondent Dave Macgregor, who has a special talent for ferreting out oddball people, has a story about a man in Hamburg (a little coastal resort between Port Alfred and East London) who is converting the farmers in the area into fine imported coffee that he serves up from a trailer. His children, Kei and Che, are making cookies to sell from the traveling business so that they can save up and buy a tractor. My favourite thing in the story is this nifty turn of phrase:

Investing R50 000 in state of the art roasters, a grinder and coffee machine, after four months in Hamburg, McConnell has already converted longtime chicory chuggers into caffeine junkies.

Chicory chuggers — I love that! Read the story here.

2. Cope’s Allan Boesak says that the ANC needs to give the DA and Helen Zille a chance in the Western Cape after promising last week to give her major uphill. Quite so, Reverend, who said the ANC’s response to losing the Western Cape to the DA smacks of a “child-like”  tantrum. Read the story here.

3. Unfortunately, the ANC is ignoring this call for constructive opposition politics, with ANC heavyweight and Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana calling Zille a “witch” while in Dutywa in the Transkei at the weekend. Read the story here. Honestly, someone as senior as the minister should not be going around trying to give Julius Malema a run for his money.

4. And while we’re on the DA, their former leader Tony Leon (writing in the Sunday Times at the weekend) about his hope that Jacob Zuma will usher out an era of frosty Mbeki politics in Parliament, suggested that the party’s parliamentary leader could be either Ryan Coetzee or Atholl Trollip. It will be interesting to see. Read the story here.

5.  Sasha-Lee Davids from Atlantis won Idols last night. If, like me, you can’t be bothered to follow the show but are curious about how she sang click here to go to KykNet, which has a range of Idols videos up from the finale. Be warned, thouhg, there’s lots of buffering and it’s a tad slow.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Five things you need to know about SA today

1. It looks like swine flu is headed our way with two suspected cases in SA. To find out more about this horribly named influenza, click here for an FAQ on WebMD.

2. The High Court has interdicted President Kgalema Mtlotanthe from granting presidential pardons, which means that former Nat minister Adriaan Vlok and General Johann van der Merwe, former head of the SA Police, will have to wait and see. Click here for the News24 story.

3. We’ll hear today if there will be another interest cut from the Reserve Bank. It is expected to do so. Read Business Day’s story here.

4. Menawhile, the Eastern Cape premier’s office is getting a jacuzzi and a gymnasium, says the Daily Dispatch. Click here for full story. That should make pow-wows in Bhisho interesting. “Pass the champagne, Premier, while I wallow.”

5. And, guess what, bloggers can break stories too but there’s no need to go anywhere else. Just read all about it here on Grubstreet.

Popularity: 2% [?]