My Take…Ssssecrecy Bill? Bah, humbug

What a waste of time pushing laws through parliament that try to muzzle the press.

It’s not in the handbook, but every civil servant knows that it’s a simple procedure: When a journalist phones with a tricky question, ask them to put it in writing and then just ignore.

Officials know that journalists will moan and groan for a while then get so frustrated with the lack of response that they will give up and move onto something else that’s newsworthy.

Thank goodness  Umdoni Municipality seems to be bucking the tried and tested ‘ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away’ system and are more forthcoming with comment of late.

And GJ Crookes is also coming to the party at last.

The Mail has tried to get comment from the hospital on many previous occasions – for good news stories and bad – and we were merely told to refer our questions in writing to Province.

In turn, Province just ignored us.

Whether this is fair comment or not, we don’t know, but the talk in the town is that if you have to go to GJ Crookes with a serious head injury, be prepared to come out minus a kidney.

Obviously that’s an exaggeration, but that’s the perception. In fact, following the Mail’s snake season story last week, several experts advised snake-bite victims to go to Kingsway at Amanzimtoti rather than take a chance that GJ Crookes stocks snake bite serum.

Our journalist anticipated a stone-walling as usual, but phoned the hospital’s PRO anyway to find out if they did stock the serum.

What a pleasant surprise. A spokesman said he ‘wasn’t too sure’ and he promised to come back to us as soon as possible.

Five minutes later, he phoned back and assured us that the hospital was well stocked and anyone bitten by a snake merely needed to rush to Casualty.

Now we have opened lines of communication with the hospital and hopefully we can help change those ugly perceptions. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ‘MY TAKE’