INCREDIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE FROM SHAHEID ALEXANDER, THE MAN YOU MIGHT NEVER SEE

Dear Readers,

A rare pictu

         It’s scary in the dark when a North Wester could be battering your windows with sheets of rain or the South Easter is threatening to blow just about everything away. Not to worry you’ll still get it.

         They didn’t call this part of the world the Cape of Storms for nothing.

         You probably will never have seen how your paper arrives, but when you wake up in the morning it will be in your driveway, just like clockwork no matter how foul the weather is.

         If you are a newspaper subscriber in Cape Town’s Southern suburbs you will have experienced that mystifying miracle daily or at week ends.

         Ten years ago Shaheid Alexander gave up his conventional job as an administrative assistant at the Cape Town City Council for a will-o`-the-wisp existence of sleepless nights delivering papers.

         He starts his night at around 10.30 p.m. and doesn’t get back to his home in Mitchells Plain until four or five in the morning. He and his team of two deliver Business Day and the Financial Mail during the week and the Sunday Times, Economist and the Financial Times at the week-ends.

         It’s a 30 km drive from his home to the industrial area of Paarden Eiland where they collect the papers and that’s before he even starts his delivery round to customers spread across suburbs from St James to Noordhoek, Fish Hoek and Simonstown.  

         Shaheid alone travels something like 200 km a night. He is constantly haunted by the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is threatening to eliminate printed papers. His team was also delivering The Times, a daily that was an offshoot of the Sunday Times, but when that went digital only two years ago the two drivers who work for him lost out to some degree. They only deliver the Sunday Times at the week-ends now to more than 300 homes.

         They get paid per copy as well as a transport allowance. Shops are not on their route as they only deal with subscribers.

         My wife and I have been getting our Sunday Times delivered to our home in Kommetjie ever since we arrived here 10 years ago and before The Times ceased being printed we got that every day during the week as well.

         It was uncanny the way Shaheid’s service was virtually faultless. On the rare occasions that our paper didn’t arrive as expected due to something  beyond his control I would phone the Sunday Times’ Cape Town office and low and behold within an hour or so we had it.

         A couple of Sunday’s ago there was no paper, but not long after I phoned Shaheid was ringing the bell at our gate. He had driven the 30 km from his home just to bring us our Sunday Times.

         It was the first time I had ever set eyes on our mystery paper man.

         “I have to see to my clients,” he told me. “They come first.”

         Aged 57 he is married with three grown up children and four grandchildren.

         “We don’t meet our clients, but I love this job,” he said. And it certainly shows in the way he does it.

         His parting words to me were: “It was nice to be of service to you, Sir.”

         You could not get a better example of a job well done.

         Thanks a million Shaheid.

         Regards,

         Jon, a Consumer Watchdog who finds it such a pleasure to meet a shining light like Shaheid at a time when bad service is very much the norm.  We need many, many more Shaheids. The owners of the Sunday Times are lucky to have him.

P.S. Any firm in the service industry wanting to improve its image could not do better than to get its staff to follow Shaheid’s example.    

JOURNALISM'S REAL DISGRACE - AND IT'S NOT QUESTIONING JACQUES PAUW'S SOURCES

Dear Newspaper readers, 

Jacques Pauw

          The Times editorial describes the Sunday Independent Editor Steven Motale’s attempts to expose Jacques Pauw’s "sources" for his book The President’s Keepers as a “disgrace to journalism.”

          Journalists have increasingly based stories on anonymous “sources,” which may or may not be real. A glaring example of how dicey this can be was the Sunday Times’ expose` about the so called rogue unit in the South African Revenue Service which was followed by a whole page apology (lotto journalism). As part of this possible, eating humble pie newspaper record, the Editor Bongani Siqoko admitted that one of the reasons they got things wrong was that they "overly relied on our sources." And that paper is in the same stable as The Times. 
            Let’s face it by attributing disclosures to so called “sources” a story can be made far more sensational than it actually is. So it’s hardly a disgrace to question their validity in Pauw’s book which has a very liberal sprinkling of them.

          The big problem arises when the words of these ghost contacts have to be substantiated in court. Will a person, who was not prepared to have his name publicly associated with an expose` of this kind, change his mind when it comes to a sensational court case, where he can be cross-examined and possibly be caught out in a lie?

          And if in defence of a story you have to make all kinds of excuses as to why your “sources” cannot come to give evidence that speaks for itself.

          Relying on “sources” to attack the reputation of the well healed can be a very risky business unless you have other much more concrete evidence to back them up.  Then it can be argued that if this other evidence it so good, why do you need to fortify it with quotes that can as likely as not be made up?

          Another problem is that journalists are never supposed to reveal the identity of their “sources” for their protection and some have actually gone to prison for this.
         Cynics might say that noble gestures of this kind are not to shield any helpful contact, but the reputation of the journalist himself, who could hardly confess to having no source at all.

          Newspaper journalism is very much going for the big one; the glory of having the splash that leads the front page, so the temptation is always there to sensationalise without the necessary facts. And that’s where untraceable “sources” can be very handy. 

          It’s one of those situations where in theory nobody but the journalist himself will ever know the truth, because it can’t be proved one way or the other.     

          It’s clear that the "disgraceful" aspect of what Motale’s paper did was that it questioned the work of a journalist. Heaven forbid that journalists eat journalists; it’s just not done old boy, certainly not in very parochial South Africa.

          If that book had been written by a non-journalist it would have been fair game.

          The Time’s editor Andrew Trench and all the other critical journalists in South Africa have been silent for years while the The Citizen, a Johannesburg based daily tabloid distributed nationally, has been aiding and abetting shysters to rip off poor and uneducated blacks with advertisements that even its editor agreed were not believable.
          They are all about "doctors" who can enlarge penises in five minute; win you the lottos and so on.

          Surely this silence is a much bigger “disgrace to journalism” than questioning Pauw’s book which only directly affects wealthy politicians and their associates.

          By coincidence Steven Motale had just become editor of The Citizen, before moving on to the Sunday Independent, when I wrote my first post about these money spinners that bring in an estimated R40 000 a day in the smalls section of that paper. Although he conceded they were not believable he said he thought the paper should still carry them with a “caution”.

          I would not have expected him to be able to dictate advertising policy to the Caxton Group, the owners of this paper. Money evidently overrode morality when it came to these advertisements.

          My first post The Citizen Aladdin’s cave of unbelievable adverts (unbelieveable) appeared early in 2013. After that I tried to get the South African Editor’s Forum, the Advertising Standards Authority and the since disbanded Print and Digital Media organisation of which both Caxton and Times Media were members to put pressure on The Citizen to get it to stop carrying these ads, but I got no joy from any of these pillars of rectitude.

          I had obviously hit the bullseye dead centre because after promoting this post on Twitter I was blocked by The Citizen. It has a circulation of 70 000 mostly black readers many of whom believe in this mumbo jumbo that is punted in theses ads.

          It has a checkered history having been founded in 1976 by the National Party apartheid government with money from a secret government slush fund to promote the party among English speakers. In 1998 it was bought by the Caxton Group, publishers of newspapers and magazines as well as being the country’s largest commercial printers.

          Terry Moolman its co-founder is the Group’s CEO.

          So Andrew Trench how about dealing with this real disgrace to South Africa’s newspapers in the next editorial in The Times. That might just achieve something far more beneficial than attacking another editor for legitimately questioning the validity

of the “sources” in Jacques Pauw’s sensational book The President’s Keepers.

          Regards,

          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman, who has always believed that if an informant is not prepared to stand up and be counted, he or she should not be given the protection of a “sources” label in any newspaper story. He must also emphasise that he hasn’t a clue whether or not Pauw’s “sources” are genuine. For that we have to rely on his impeccable reputation as an investigative journalist of long standing. What Jon has written here about “sources” are his general observations about this kind of reporting and don’t refer to any particular person.

P.S. My sources tell me that there is not a chance in hell that any South African newspaper journalist will criticise The Citizen for what it is doing. It could just affect their future job prospects in a very small market.

      

SOUTH AFRICA'S BLACK AND WHITE COLONIALISM VIEW

Dear Lovers of Free Speech,

          The Letter’s Column in today’s The Times puts Helen Zille’s controversial tweet about colonialism being not all bad into the right perspective.

          It mirrored exactly what happens on social media and in the press in South Africa.

          If you are Black your freedom of speech, which can be just as controversial, if not more so than Zille’s tweet, can be a lot more free than if you are White saying much the same thing. And racialism as well as other kinds of prejudice is also far more serious if you are White than if you are Black.

          Under the heading Zille:Racist or truth teller? there were five letters on the subject. The first three broadly speaking supporting Zille’s view appeared to be from Whites with the last two from Blacks joining the hysteria about her remarks.

          The most telling one from Louis highlighted what the wild dogs of the media conveniently ignored when jumping on the #ZilleMustGo bandwagon.

          He pointed out that in the Saturday Star of February 4 Kabelo Chabala, who is clearly Black, wrote: “The truth is South Africa and many other African countries are better because of colonialism.  We are better developed because of the infrastructure that was built by colonisers.”

          So there are some Blacks who can see exactly what Zille was talking about through the prejudice.

          “The reaction? Not an indignant squeak,” was Louis’ comment. He added, “In the new South Africa everybody has a place. And Whites’ place is in the wrong even when we are in the right.”

          Significantly Chabala’s very balanced view appeared in Saturday Star more than a month before Zille’s tweet on 16 March. And when our impartial media that is always looking for the truth, was doing its utmost to cash in on the social network frenzy that Zille caused, did anyone hunt him down for a more extensive interview. If they did I can’t find it anywhere. 

          Social media appears to have been ominously quiet when the long running case against Jon Qwelane, the veteran journalist notorious for his homophobic views, came up again. The Times tucked the story away under the innocuous heading ‘Hate speech laws not consistent’ on one side of Page 6. A day later Zille’s crime was splashed across the front page headlined: Zille’s tweet too far.

          Compare his case with that of Penny Sparrow, an elderly, sickly former estate agent. She got into trouble early in 2016 for her tweet complaining about hordes of “monkeys” being allowed to mess up Durban’s beaches over New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

          Within months she was fined R150 000 by an Equity Court with a further R5 000 in a Magistrates Court for the criminal offence of crimen injuria.

          Qwelane made his own headlines in 2008 when he outraged the gay community with a column in the Sunday Sun entitled Call me names but gay is NOT okay.

He has yet to be found guilty and sentenced, 8 years after the column appeared.

          In it he lauded Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe’s anti gay stance. He went on to complain that “you regularly see men kissing other men in public and shamefully flaunting what are misleadingly termed their ‘sexual preferences.’”

          He lambasted the constitution and wrote that he prayed the politicians would have “the balls” to rewrite it “to excise those sections which give license to men marrying other men, and ditto women.

          “Otherwise at this rate,” he went on, “how soon before some idiot demands to ‘marry’ an animal and that this constitution ‘allows’ it. And by the way tell the Human Rights Commission that I totally refuse to withdraw or apologise for my views, because wrong is wrong.”          

          Our own President Jacob Zuma appears to have agreed with Qwelane because in 2010, while at least one court case against him was pending, he appointed the scribe as the South African Ambassador to Uganda. Evidently in his wisdom our President felt that Qwelane would feel at home there because Uganda has outlawed homosexuality with life imprisonment being the penalty for those who transgress. The previous death sentence was apparently considered too harsh.

          In 2011 a South African Equity Court ordered him to pay R100 000 towards a gay rights group and to apologise to that community. His was a much more serious offence than Sparrow’s when one considers not only what he wrote, but that the Sunday Sun has a readership of over 2-million. In addition he made it clear that he had no intention of apologising, whereas Sparrow did just that.

          The South African Human Rights Commission received a record 350 complaints about Qwelane’s column. That’s how bad it was yet the Equity Court showed, by the penalty it arrived at that his offence was not regarded as seriously as Sparrow’s. Did his colour stand him in good stead?  

          The newspaper, which is in the Media 24 stable, printed an apology but why it was never charged for carrying such obviously contentious muck, only the state will know. Qwelane on the other hand won’t say sorry. He believes what the paper did was enough.

          That was not the end of the story. The Equity Court’s finding was annulled because Qwelane was not at the hearing as he was conveniently in Uganda at the time.

The Human Rights Commission then took up the case in which he has been challenging his conviction in the Johannesburg High Court on the basis that the parts of the Equity Act, under which he was found guilty, infringed his right to free speech.

          Various hearings have been held, sometimes without him as he claimed he was ill and it still hasn’t ended. It just goes on and on.      

          It’s a very far cry from the almost instant “justice” meted out to the little old White lady who didn’t have an editor or sub-editor to vet her thoughtless tweet before she let it loose on the world.

          There are only one or two African countries that have never been colonised. So perhaps somebody should see if their infrastructure and other facilities are up to the standard of the ones that have. But I don’t think the colonialism-was-all-bad school would want that. It might just blow their case.

          If colonialism and apartheid had nothing to commend them what will the plusses be for South Africa by grabbing prosperous farms without compensation and an affirmative action policy that rewards people essentially on colour rather than ability?  

          Regards

          Jon, who believes that if all South African’s media showed the same social media maturity as Panyaza Lesufi ( most mature social media user ) we would all be a lot better off. He’s BLACK by the way.

P.S. Helen Zille is the 66 year old Premier of the Western Cape and the former leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance party.
  

WHY A MINIMUM WAGE IS A VERY BAD IDEA

Dear Cyril Ramaphosa, Deputy President of South Africa,

          Surely the most important thing we need to do in our country at the moment is to ensure that the millions without a job get work, any work at any rate.

          By forcing a minimum wage of R3 500 on all employers, all you are doing is looking after the people who are already in a job when our unemployment rate is sky high at 26% and rising.

          And it could even cause some workers to lose their jobs if their employers can’t afford the new rate. By far the worst aspect is that at the same time it will ensure that a lot of those without work will never, ever be able to get started.

Letter in The Times

          In its analysis of this plan the Institute for Race Relations also believes that it will “only further limit the access to the labour market” for the unemployed.

          Sir, which would your prefer to have; a regular job that pays say R2 000 or even less per month or no job at all. Imagine, if you can, that you also have a wife and two children to support and her job as a domestic came to an end because her employer could no longer afford to pay her the minimum wage stipulated for her category when that came into force a few years ago.

          How many domestic workers lost their permanent jobs and are now working on an hourly basis a few days a week because a minimum wage was decreed for them?         

          I almost missed out on a career in journalism because of the minimum wage for reporters that was in force in Britain when I started. Typically it was a union idea -the National Union of Journalists.

          I was 22 when I arrived there from South Africa determined to become a journalist. The only problem was that according to what the Union decreed an apprentice started at 17 so a 22 year old had to be paid the rate of somebody with five years experience.

          Hardly surprisingly I battled to find anybody to take me on, even though I was happy to work for just about nothing to get a foot in the door.

Letter in The Times

          Eventually I was accepted by one of the few papers in the country that didn’t recognise a union and nobody bothered about this because it was so small. That’s where I started on a pittance and I was actually married at the time.

          It was a real sweat shop that consisted of the editor, a sadistic news editor and three very green reporters – me, another guy and a girl who was in tears almost every day. The turnover of the staff was such that after eight months I was the most experience reporter.

          It was the fastest learning school I ever experienced. For instance on my first day in a little town I had only been in for a few days the news editor asked me to report on an accident. He gave me the address and when I naively asked where this was he flew into a rage and told me to damned well look it up on the map.

          You had to report just about everything that happened there to fill the paper and if the news editor heard you had passed the registry office without noticing the confetti in the street that showed a wedding had taken place there was hell to pay. You would then be grilled by him and the editor for an hour or more.

          The training I got there enabled me to write for just about all the major British newspapers as a freelance and become an investigative journalist on The Star and the Sunday Times in Johannesburg. All of this would not have been possible if that minimum wage had been rigidly enforced.

          Of course unions love minimum wage regulations because they do what they do best; they destroy enterprise and reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator. They also ensure that nobody works at a rate that will undercut their members.

          Pandering to them however does nothing to ensure that the majority have a job, any job as long as they can earn something.

          Fortunately like so many of our African National Congress master plans a minimum wage is unlikely to work because the policing will be so bad. We have lived in the same place for the last 10 years and nobody has ever come to us to ensure that we pay our maid the required minimum.

          Regards,

          Jon who believes that anything that stifles freedom of choice in the job market can only be bad, very bad.        

  

MEET SOUTH AFRICA'S MOST MATURE SOCIAL MEDIA USER

Dear South Africans, 

The Black Education Minister in the Gauteng Province, Panyaza Lesufi has just shown that he is the most level-headed social media user in South Africa. He’s educated us all brilliantly. Thanks so much Minister for setting such a shining example.

Let’s hope you are followed by the entire country.

On Sunday when Lesufi went on Twitter he was shocked to be bombarded by an unprovoked racial attack. An anonymous user called him a “Fucking Kaffir” paedophile.

The cowardly racist hid behind the name “Summer Starstead” using the handle @uncucklord.

To illustrate his “cuck” he took a picture from Lesufi’s Twitter feed of the Minister in the jeans he wore in case he had to jump over a fence to get into a Johannesburg crèche that was said to be separating white and black kids during meal times.

“Here you have Gauteng MEC for Education @lesufi ready to jump a fence to take pics of toddlers. Fucking Kaffir pedo,” was his inflammatory comment

Instead of blasting off against his incredibly uncouth detractor he showed the kind of maturity not yet displayed in similar circumstances in South Africa. He also didn’t rush off to lay a complaint to the Equity Court in the hope that it would be able to track down and nail this racist in the same way it had done with former estate agent Penny Sparrow. She was fined R150 000 for calling Black beachgoers monkeys.

No, he did nothing more than to politely tweet, “Don’t call me with the K-word please.” This just goaded @uncucklord to hurl further abuse at him with the use of the K-word and the question as to why he was not wearing “piss-soaked animal skins” as this was his “traditional attire.”

The Minister was referring to Hendrik Verwoed,
            South Africa's Prime Minister who was credited
with being the architect of apartheid

         Again he kept his cool with this reply: “This one keeps calling me with the K-word. I’m not going to block him. He must just enjoy insulting me.”

It was obvious that this gutter snipe stuff was coming from a White person.

The Minister subsequently told his 27 200 followers: “Racists can insult me as they wish, but my commitment to a non-racial, equal and quality education for all our children remains unshakeable.

“Their children will study, dance and play with our children in one class and drink water from the same tap. If this hurts racists hard luck.”

The Times reported that he said his parents had taught him “to respect those who hate you, as it is through respect that you can change your enemy.”

Well done again Panyaza. Nothing annoys people more when you don’t react as expected however much they insult you.

By taking punitive action against these gutless snipers too scared to show themselves you only turn them into heroes among their own kind. You put them in the lime light they are craving. And then the racialism wrecking ball carries on dividing our society.

Regards

Jon, a Minister Panyaza Lesufi ADMIRER.

P.S. Here’s a group who would have done well Mr Minister to have had your sensible approach. The case of course was very different. There was no racialism involved. All I did was take four journalists to task for using foul language on twitter. The significance was that they wouldn’t be allowed to use the same words when writing for the publications they worked for, so I argued that by using them on Twitter they were damaging their own and the reputations of whoever employed them. And even though they were in the business of criticising other people, all but one of them could not take it from me, so they BLOCKED ME on Twitter. The Blockers

*Note: “Cuck” is short for cuckold. It has been given all kinds of meanings most of them very racist and disgusting. But it is apparently most commonly used on Twitter to describe anti-white Whites. I can’t see where that fits in this case. Another definition which is appropriate is that it is an “unscrupulous person.”

You can’t of course have fewer scruples than Summer Starstead who the Minister assumed is a man, but if Sparrow’s actions are anything to go by there could be a woman behind it. 

SUNDAY TIMES LOTTO JOURNALISM - HOW IT WORKS

Dear Newspaper Readers,

Pravin Gordhan

          The Johannesburg based Sunday Times is using lotto journalism with increasing regularity. This is in spite of the fact that the Editor Bongani Siqoko told us last month, as part of a whole page apology about its so called “SARS rogue unit” expose`, that they had got “some things wrong” and one of the reasons was they “overly relied on our sources.”

          This didn’t stop the paper doing exactly the same thing this last Sunday to boost its sensational front page splash Pravin ‘arrest’ shock.

          How what I have dubbed “lotto journalism” works is this. The paper decides on the most sensational line for the story and then gives you, the reader this regardless of the facts by using anonymous “sources.”

The apology 3 April 

          The most glaring example of this was in its latest episode of its “rogue unit” saga that has been going on for two years. It was about how Pravin Gordhan South Africa’s current Minister of Finance and eight other former South African Revenue Service officials, who were said to have been members of the “unit,” were about to be prosecuted for “espionage.”

          The paper claimed that the unit, which was supposed to have illegally spied on tax payers among other things, was formed when Gordhan headed SARS as its Commissioner.

          In its last Sunday edition the paper quoted the National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Luvuyo Mfaku as saying: “It is incorrect that a decision has been made to prosecute anyone. The matter is still under investigation.”

Sunday 15 May

          Keeping that bad journalism cliché “don’t let the facts spoil a good story” well and truly alive the paper then covered itself both ways by falling back on its unreliable “sources” with this:

          “But highly placed NPA sources confirmed that national director of public prosecutions Shaun Abrahams ‘is ready to prosecute.’”

          That made Mfaku out to be a liar.

          The reliability of the Sunday Times’ “sources” was exposed a day later on the Monday when The Times, a daily in the same Times Media stable as the Sunday Times, came out with Reprieve for Gordhan as its front page lead.

          It quoted Abrahams, the man the Sunday Times inexplicably could not get hold of, as saying: “It is completely incorrect to say that anyone is going to be arrested or even faces arrest.”

          The Sunday Times story which ran from the front page onto page two contained allegations and information in no less than seven statements from anonymous “sources” and stated as fact that “Gordhan is being accused of breaching the Intelligence Act for his role in the formation of the ‘rogue unit’ when he headed SARS.”

Monday 16 May

          The trouble with relying on these is that anyone can sit in an office and make up quotes from “sources” to make a story more sensational. And if the paper is ever called upon to prove in court the allegations made by one of these anonymous people it would not be able to do it because journalists conveniently have a long standing tradition of never revealing their “sources.”

          Siqoko emphasised this aspect in that whole page apology, which must have been some kind of record, when he wrote that it was their responsibility “to build, sustain and protect a relationship with our sources.”

          As the Sunday Times and The Times have now given us conflicting versions of the story one of them must be lying.  And my “sources” tell me it is the Sunday Times.

Van Loggerenberg

          In that whole page apology on April 3 2016 that I mentioned earlier Johann van Loggerenberg, SARS Group Executive, Tax & Custom Enforcement and Ivan Pillay, the Deputy Commissioner, both of whom the paper had accused of being part of the “rogue unit” were allowed to have their say under the banner headline: Finally we agree to lay to rest the controversy surrounding SARS and the Sunday Times even though both of them had resigned from the tax department.

          Van Loggerenburg’s statement was headed: ‘Rogue’ unit never broke the law and was very effective. And Pillay’s one put the case against the Sunday Times in a nutshell with: The ‘rogue unit’ narrative was a great disservice to public interest, and made up of lies and distortions.

Pillay

          On the other side of the page under Our response the Editor Siqoko sort to justify this huge climb down as being an “amicable settlement.” He confessed that in the 30 or so reports that had been in the paper so far about the unit they had got things right but had also got some wrong and had also given incomplete information.

          He blamed their unnamed “sources” for some of the problems and conceded that they had stated some allegations as fact.

          What he wrote about the investigation in general gave the impression that the newsgathering short-comings of the paper were a lot more serious than just the ones that had occurred in this inquiry

          “The SARS story has given us an opportunity to take a closer look at our news-gathering and production processes,” he told readers.

          “We have found some serious gaps. Efforts are being made to close these.”

          In a block at the end of his response he stated that “an amicable settlement’ had been reached with the two men “in respect of various matters before the Press Ombudsman” and in terms of this all Ombudsman (presumably the complaints the two men had made) matters would be withdrawn by all parties. Van Loggerenberg had also agreed not to institute any civil claims against the paper.

          “The settlement is considered full and final and on this basis no further actions will be taken.”

          This latest Sunday Times report names Van Loggerenberg and Pillay as being among the ex-SARS employees likely to be arrested. It now raises this BIG QUESTION: HAS THE PAPER BROKEN THE SPIRIT OF THE AGREEMENT, AT THE VERY LEAST, BY TARNISHING THE IMAGE OF THE TWO MEN ONCE AGAIN, THIS TIME EVEN MORE SERIOUSLY THAN BEFORE?

          Far from laying to rest the controversy surrounding SARS and the Sunday Times this has made it a lot worse, especially if it turns out to be “made up of lies and distortions” as Pillay labelled the earlier reports.  

          According to the story the Hawks, the country’s top investigative unit, had handed over a case docket to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for a decision to prosecute.

          Since the beginning of the year the paper has published quite a few apologies for not getting both sides of the story in various reports and it now appears to have done that again.        

          Van Loggerenburg was quoted as saying he had “done nothing wrong”

 and would co-operate with any investigation.

          There was no mention of Pillay having been contacted and of the other people named two were said to be “unavailable”, another one “did not respond to questions,” while “Gordhan’s office declined to comment.”

None of the three reporters (why you need three for one story is beyond me) doing the investigation appear to have even tried to speak to the other three men named.

As this was not any run of the mill story I would have thought the Sunday Times would have been more circumspect than usual, especial in view of the history, to make sure it go everything absolutely right.

          If Gordhan was to be arrested it was expected to plunge the country into a new financial crisis similar to what happened when President Zuma axed Nhlanhla Nene, who had only been in the Finance Minister’s job for seven months. He was replaced with little known, small town mayor David van Rooyen, before being shifting four days later.

Van Rooyen had his cabinet post swapped with Gordhan, the Minister of Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs at the time.

          Even two of the Sunday Time’s own reporters were not happy with the paper’s handling of this long running investigation. Pearlie Joubert resigned after taking it to task when Phylicia Oppelt was still in the Editor’s chair for what she believed was the unethical way the probe had been conducted. This was denied by the paper.

          Piet Rampedi, who with other reporters had gathered evidence of what the paper claimed showed that SARS had spied illegally on taxpayers, took to Twitter under the user name Mr. Putin to slam the agreement that was made with the two tax men.

          “Yes ST’s bleeding commercially. But we're so desperate 4 adverts & 2 please Gordhan that we sell editorial integrity,” was one tweet followed by:

          “Despite a self-serving deal between ST & criminal suspects I believe our stories were factual and can prove in court.”

          As you can imagine these outbursts are hardly likely to advance their journalist careers. Rampedi is also no longer with the Sunday Times.

          To be fair to Siqoko he only became the Sunday Times Editor at the beginning of the year, so the majority of the “Rogue unit” stories were published under his predecessor Oppelt, who was moved “up stairs” as the saying goes.

          Did the way this SARS intrigued was revealed have anything to do with this? My “sources” are mum on that.

          Regards

          Jon, The Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman

P.S.  See also: jonas story & lotto journalism; is sunday times aiming for junk status;     sunday times needs truth drug

             

          

PATRICIA VAN ROOYEN - CEO IN A MILLION

Dear Consumers,

Patricia van Rooyen

          Have you ever had much joy trying to lodge a complaint directly with a Chief Executive Officer of a large company? Well in my limited experience even if you are able to get their direct email address the chances are they won’t answer you.

          Your inquiry will tumble down the line to some lesser minion.

          That’s exactly what happened when I emailed Maria Ramos (Absa's Star), the CEO of the giant Barclays Africa Group that includes Absa Bank, about a problem I was having getting a refund when my credit card was scammed.

          Perhaps you think I’m being unreasonable but my feeling is that as Maria made her personal email address (maria.ramos@absa.co.za) available to the likes of me she should have answered my emails personally. Either that or she should have ensured that her personal email address was not available to ordinary bank clients like me.

          Patricia van Rooyen on the other hand is a very different, special CEO when it comes to customer service. She heads the M-net pay television’s Sub-Sahara region.

I accept that the M-net is a good bit smaller than the banking empire that Maria heads even if M-net does stretch across Africa, but I don’t think that invalidates my point.

          As an M-net subscriber I have raised several matters with Patricia in the past and she has always replied to my emails almost instantly and my problems have been sorted out quickly.

          So when I saw a disturbing report in The Times by that ace consumer journalist Wendy Knowler I sent this email to Patricia.   

      “I was appalled to read in Wendy Knowler’s column in The Times today that Multichoice (part of M-net) is doing its best to force subscribers to buy new decoders by not repairing or replacing old ones. Talk about an unscrupulous business practice. Loyal subscribers like myself, who have been with Multichoice for something like 20 years could find themselves forced to buy a new decoder by this deplorable business practice. How many people would buy something that might need to be repaired in the future if they were told this might not happen? How long will it be before this make money at all costs firm decides that it’s time to drum up more business by not repairing the decoders that people are being forced to buy now? Just because M-net/Multichoice have got a virtual monopoly it’s no excuse for treating customers like dirt to be milked and then discarded, just to try and make more and more money. It’s customer relations at its worst.”

          This was Patricia’s reply: “Allow me to put some perspective on the matter. All hardware and software technology changes and improves over time. This applies to cellphones, laptops, PCs etc. A decoder is no different. It is very unlikely that if I have a Nokia cellphone that is 10 years old, and I take it in for repairs that anyone will be able to repair it – as the parts will probably not be available. They will tell me to rather buy a new phone; it will be cheaper to buy a new phone anyway. So – in a nutshell – there are simply some very old models of decoders that we can no longer support. They have a lifespan, and at some point they become redundant.

          “When Microsoft tells their customers it is time for an upgrade of software no-one complains. Yet, if you had a PC that was 10 years old you would not be able to upgrade your Microsoft. The software and the hardware must both be upgraded for the software to work. The new decoder software will simply not work on old decoders. We really don’t have any intention of treating our customers badly – on the contrary we want them to have great viewing experience, hence upgrades in both software and hardware are necessary so our viewers can have great features like Box Office, catch up, remote record and, and, and.

          “Maybe our problem is that we don’t explain ourselves well. Maybe we should tell our customers that the life span of a decoder is approximately 6 years and then it will need to be replaced. We make no money on the sale of decoders. In fact we subsidise the price to try and make them more affordable. So every single decoder we sell costs us money.”

          “Not sure if I make sense, but that really is the situation.”

          I replied thanking her for the explanation and getting another of her executives to clarify some other questions I had.

          BUT THE REAL POINT OF THIS POST IS THIS. MY INITIAL EMAIL TO HER WAS SENT ON TUESDAY AUGUST 25 AT 12:14 AM.

          SHE REPLIED AT 10.18 PM ON THE SAME DAY SAYING “SORRY I AM ONLY GETTING BACK TO YOU NOW.”

          YOU KNOW WHERE PATRICIA, WHO IS BASED IN JOHANNESBURG, WAS – IN LAGOS, WEST AFRICA.

          NOW THAT’S SERVICE FOR YOU.

          Regards,

          Jon, the Consumer Watchdog who believes in praising the good as well as taking the bad to task.

P.S. In my final email to her I added: “I am sure this will never be necessary as I will be gone long before you, but if it happens the other way round your efficiency is such that if I sent you an email you would answer it from heaven.”

The Power Report short circuited

Dear Megan Power,

What a let down that was. Your power has been advertised recently all over the place as if you were some supernatural being who could perform miracles for consumers.

The Times carried a whole page with your stern looking image peering out of it and we were told, Ripped off? Fight back.  Megan Power. Batting for you.

We were assured your Power Report in the Sunday Times each week would be championing our rights as consumers and exposing the bad.

Featured this week it said, would be defective new cars, shoddy repair jobs and appalling service.

All very impressive. People must have rushed out to get the paper in which you were going to tell all about how you sorted out these rip off artists in no uncertain terms.

Perhaps I’m being a bit naïve. I always thought the main purpose of a consumer column was to ensure, as far a possible, that consumers got justice. And with the huge circulation of a paper, like the Sunday Times behind you, suppliers would be more likely to come to heal rather than risk further bad publicity.

But that means they have to fear being named.

That brings me to that let down I mentioned in the beginning.

Your first report after that massive promotion in The Times (the Sunday Time’s little sister) consisted of a litany of complaints against SA’s top car brands and leading dealerships and involve new, and mostly very expensive cars.

After that build up complainants had every reason to believe that your power would result in having their problems sorted out.

They must have got a shock because all you did was to list a dozen anonymous complaints about nameless vehicles and dealers. If that’s all the power you’ve got you should team up with Eskom. It also specialises in keeping people in the dark.

You told us things like how dealerships had reneged on promises to replace a R275 000 car, after it was stolen while in for servicing; damaged a car worth R250 000 while in for repair; driven a customer’s vehicle into another one while it was being serviced and done a shoddy repair and so on.

BUT NOBODY WAS NAMED AND SHAMED, Megan.

I know you are only as powerful as the paper your work for so I have to asked: Hasn't the Sunday Times got the guts to allow you to name all these dealers and top car brands?

Or is it that your power has been short circuited because your paper doesn’t want to offend them in case they might cancel million rand, colour adverts in your paper?

All you ended up doing was passing the buck. Your article concluded by telling readers they could take their grievances to the Retail Motor Industry Organisation, but only if the supplier is one of its members. Last time I contacted them I was told to pay a fee of several hundred rand for the privileged of lodging my complaint.

You also suggested the Motor Industry Ombud or the National Consumer Commission and you added that patience is required when dealing with these organisations.

That’s exactly why people contacted you because they were hoping that the Sunday Times had the power to help them quickly, especially as patience is not a virtue that is easily cultivated when you haven’t got wheels.

Yours watchfully,

Jon, Consumer Watchdog and Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman.

P.S. Please lodge this as a complaint.

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