Dear DM168 readers,
This week a group of us attended a Daily Maverick online workshop facilitated by our Head of Talent Lydia Rolando, titled “managing with heart”.
“Managing” in our mad media industry, for those in the know, is a euphemism for herding cats, making plans and then pirouetting a quick pivot when they don’t work out, and keeping them on track if they do.
It’s about taking the rap when things go wrong and doing the heavy lifting to make it right again. Hiring, guiding, taking flak. Being all over the place at the same time. Troubleshooting, firefighting and on occasion, having to summon your absent inner agony aunt or uncle.
It’s about managing upwards, downwards, sideways and inside outwards, while doing our various day jobs of writing, editing, data-wrangling, publishing, accounting, organising events, client and membership relationship-building, selling advertising, subscriptions, books, memberships, sponsorships of events and webinars, and more…
More often than not it’s about squeezing water out of stone budgets to make good journalism happen. Why? Because Google and Facebook ate our advertising bread and butter.
And the business of journalism is a battle to sustain because seeking truth and helping people know more and know better is just not as profitable as providing platforms for people to share cat videos, dance moves, gossip, hate speech, disinformation and misinformation. And let’s not forget those ego-fluffing and strutting narcissistic posts and poses.
Phew. Exhausting when you think of all we have to do to ensure we are able to keep on serving you. But I digress.
It’s about trust
What came out of our “managing with heart” workshop that really struck me was a realisation of the invisible hand that holds all that we are and all that we do. Trust.
Without trusting each other, we would not be able to work together in the maverick way we do. Without your trust as readers, we would be buried deep in the dustbin of recent media history. Trust is not a given. It is worked for and earned, incrementally, hour by hour, interaction by interaction, day by day, year by year.
Trust is not a promise. It’s a commitment. It’s an action. You have to prove that you are trustworthy, not by saying you are trustworthy but by being trustworthy in all that you do.
It’s not easy. We are human after all. We make mistakes. Mess up. Forget. Have bad days. We sometimes let our egos and feelings run wild. But being trustworthy is not about being perfect or right all the time. It’s also about taking accountability for mistakes, owning up to them, learning from them, being responsible enough to correct course and try again. It’s about being open and honest.
Which brings me to why I have completely lost my trust in President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Too often we have been told that Ramaphosa is the best leader South Africa has to fix the country, after the nine wasted years under former president Jacob Zuma. I don’t believe this. Ramaphosa leads the very party that has ruined our country and led us right into the heart of darkness, literally and figuratively.
The ANC always tells us it is a collective. Its chairman, Gwede Mantashe, in defence of Zuma, in the parliamentary vote of no confidence in 2017, said as much: “I don’t know where this notion comes from that we are a collection of individuals who have a conscience. We are members of the ANC in a party political system.”
In other words, as revealed bit by tedious bit in the Zondo Commission, the ANC is a complex network of political patronage that is held together by payback in the form of cadre deployment, government tenders, backhands, bribes and corruption.
It has bloated the civil service, denuded public enterprises of any semblance of functionality through State Capture, ruined water, sanitation, roads and electricity infrastructure through a failure of regular maintenance.
Feeding off the state trough
Can a network that is so dependent on feeding off the state trough, from the smallest municipality to the largest state enterprise, be expected to miraculously renew itself and become the flag-bearers of anti-corruption, excellent public service and probity? I think not. And everywhere we look, we see not. Yet Ramaphosa would like us to believe that the ANC is good and clean and fresh tra-la-la, now that he has been voted in for another term.
On Monday, Ramaphosa in his From the desk of the President letter to the nation was all kumbaya about how we must all work together and play our part to end our rolling blackout woes.
Not once did he acknowledge that we are in these dire straits because of systematic ANC failures. In true obfuscatory politics-speak he said the following:
“We should not make the mistakes of the past. For many years, critical maintenance was deferred, and our power stations were run too hard in order to keep the lights on. As a country we are now paying the price for these miscalculations.”
This is all well and good except for the glaringly obvious fact that we as a country are paying the price for the ANC’s mistakes and miscalculations. There is no turning back from that.
If the president did a mea culpa, acknowledged his party’s culpability in making things fall apart and showed us genuinely that the party would weed out the inept, venal and corrupt, maybe just maybe, this would be one small step in earning my trust. Until then, like the ANC’s warmongering, sovereign-country-invading Russian besties say, Nyet!
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In this week’s DM168 we have dedicated five pages to focus on our energy crisis. Our Burning Planet journalists Onke Ngcuka and Julia Evans write about how the ANC stalled the renewal energy plan, and why it’s not serving its purpose in plugging the energy shortfall.
DM associate editor Marianne Merten rips the rose-tinted sunglasses off our ahistorical eyes and shows fact by fact exactly how it’s not Eskom as an entity, but successive ANC cadres since 1996 that are to blame for our current crisis.
Tembile Sgqolana and Estelle Ellis explain why the angry residents of Komani in the Enoch Mgijima Municipality, who have been left in darkness for days, say “corrupt ANC leaders have destroyed this municipality”.
Please send your comments on these and other stories, or any ideas you might have to solve our energy crisis to [email protected]
Yours in defence of truth and in search of light,
Heather.
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.
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