The first volume of my Sunday Times ‘Out to Lunch’ columns came out in 2002. Not surprisingly the book was titled ‘Out to Lunch’ (its sequel, published in 2005, was rather unimaginatively called ‘Out to Lunch Again’) and it was a collection of what I considered were the best of my efforts from September 1996 to May 2002.
The book came out a month before Christmas 2002 and I hoped it might make a decent stocking filler for those who had followed and enjoyed the column in the newspaper. There is, admittedly, a degree of vanity involved when producing a compendium of columns that somebody has probably already read but my publisher, Jonathan Ball, thought it could work. He had been prodded into action by a leading business figure who was a huge fan of the outspokenness of the column. The management at the Sunday Times in those days were fully behind the project and even negotiated an advance on the publication. Since all the author’s proceeds were to be distributed between two charities, that was an added bonus. If the book turned out to be a complete flop then at least Hospice Witwatersrand would receive some benefit.
Once the book was published, I did the usual round of well-attended book launches and signings and to my delight and surprise ‘Out to Lunch’ became number 1 on the Exclusive Books bestseller list for two weeks before Christmas and remained on the bestseller list for several weeks after. This didn’t go down at all well with two of my colleagues, Fred Khumalo and Justice Malala, who had to wait another six years before putting the boot in. Journalism, as I only discovered later, is a tall-poppy syndrome activity.
Lest you should think that I’ve finally lost the plot and am dredging up long-past successes to make myself feel more relevant than I am, let me reassure you that I am merely setting the scene.
My four published volumes normally lie undisturbed and gathering dust on a bookshelf, wedged between P G Wodehouse and Clive James (I like to keep good company), but this week I decided to take down the first two of them, blow the fish moths off the cover, and re-read some of my earlier works. I have to say that I can quite understand why the book sped to the Number 1 bestseller position and why the likes of Khumalo and Malala felt so eclipsed by my success. But, modesty aside, what really struck me when reading the articles was that nothing much has changed in the last twenty-odd years.
For example, on 21 June 2001, I wrote a column titled ‘Stupidity is no excuse for the SAA debacle – off with their heads’. Departing CEO Coleman Andrews had just been paid a whopping R232 million for three years’ work and the Transnet board were ducking and diving, no doubt to prevent further media probing. I make the point that ‘most of the Transnet board have been hideously overpromoted’ as the Chairwoman at the time, Louise Tager, was reported by the business press to be ‘evasive’. I made a few choice comments about transparency, but to no avail. So you see, dear reader, either I’m the Nostradamus of SA journalism or the problems were so bloody obvious back then that even an untrained, once-a-week columnist like me could spot them.
On 22 July 2001, I wrote a piece titled ‘What “Special Price” Yengeni had to say about his Mercedes’. Those of you with a good memory will remember that Tony (Sweaty Palms) Yengeni managed to dishonestly purloin a luxury Mercedes 4X4 and then spent an estimated R250 000 of taxpayer money to run full-page adverts in selected newspapers to protest his innocence. Although he went on to serve a short but very pampered prison sentence, Yengeni, ever the patriotic scoundrel, said at the time that the biggest casualty of the affair was not Yengeni or the ANC but South Africa. Despite being one of the first (and few) to serve time for corruption, Teflon Tony is still bobbing around on the scene 19 years later, occasionally driving his luxury cars while drunk and basically giving the middle finger to all law-abiding South Africans. Last year Tony popped across to Venezuela to pay homage to Nicolas Maduro’s rear end and find out what a properly run socialist Utopia looks like. Pretty good if you’re a guest of the corrupt regime, I imagine, but pretty shitty for the rest of the population (although this could just be Western imperialist propaganda). The question we should all be asking is how on earth Yengeni is still on board and receiving largesse from the ANC. One must only assume that his sins are regarded as no more than petty misdemeanours compared with the really serious criminal activity of many of his senior party colleagues.
Various other columns from that period question dodgy government deals, ANC nepotism, corporate shenanigans and the willingness even back then to appoint commissions to ‘look into things’. Precisely the sort of topics we are still confronting today.
But it was a column from January 12 2003 that really resonated. In that column I mentioned the late Michael Vestey, who used to be the radio critic for The Spectator magazine. In the 14/21 December 2003 edition of that magazine, Mr Vestey reviewed a BBC programme on Zimbabwe and wrote, ‘When people talk of Africa being a basket case, Zimbabwe proves the point. In time, I fear, South Africa will go the same way but even more spectacularly’. At the time, my SA patriotism came to the fore and I took issue with Mr Vestey, accusing him of making absurd and damaging comments about SA totally unsupported by evidence.
Perhaps if I had reread more of my own past columns I would have been more in tune with Mr Vestey’s gloomy prediction. When it comes to disastrous and inept government it seems that nothing has changed in the past twenty-odd years. When I am reminded by fresh-faced, woke, young optimists that I am a reactionary dinosaur and that there is light at the end of the tunnel I try not to point out to them that it might be an oncoming train.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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