Five things you need to know about SA today

1. The Daily Dispatch has a hot national scoop, which I’m sure everyone else will pick up on soon. It seems the government has quietly been raising the bar for schoolkids passing grades up to Grade 8.  Well done, guys. You make little old East London proud that we have  such a fine little paper. Weird that this has been officially announced yet. Click here to read the story.

2. Meanwhile,  everybody’s running  reams on the  state-of-the-nation speech by President Jacob Zuma but not all the big online news media players are projecting their editorial comment, which is what we’re want today: an editor’s highly informed opinion and concise breakdown of the speech. So I’ve sought around for you and  Business Day’s is worth reading. It says the speech did not show signs of new policy but defined the bigger context of government aims: the recession and the need to work in partnership to tackle it. Read the overarching piece here.

3. In his blog, The Times editor Ray Hartley zoned in  Zuma’s talk of rejuvenating the school system. He says the speech missed the important ingredient here: that more resources need to be allocated to schools to keep class sizes manageable. Interesting in light of the Daily Dispatch story.  Read it here.

4.  News24 has very neatly broken down the key themes of the speech with Zuma’s statements. Very user friendly! I like.

5. And News24 also has a good left-of-field story that stands out amid the state-of-the-nation stuff: the swanky cars used by members of the Gauteng legislature aren’t insured. Yikes! That’s a lot of risk for the tax payer! The story claims that the reason is due to insurance firms not being prepared to take the risk because they  are “misused” though I don’t see too much in the story to stand that up except for a DA claim. Read it here. Come on, guys, you  need to canvas some insurance firms to get corroboration. It’s a hot story — don’t fall down in the detail.

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Five things you need to know about SA today

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.

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