Our yearly journalism seminar is around the corner where fellow newshounds from all over the country meet to exchange notes and learn from industry veterans.
Getting some professional input into the job at hand can never be a bad thing. Plumbers charge call out fees just to tell you what is causing the blocked drain and doctors get a consultation fee for what feels like five minutes to tell you what is wrong with you.
Yet when it comes to local government all the advice seems to be lost in the channels somewhere. A couple of weeks backs the auditor general announced that only a handful out of hundreds of municipalities are getting clean audits and it is largely due to mismanagement of funds a corruption. I think our country’s politicians are paying attention to the wrong financial advice. Well from our point at least.
By this time I usually queue my brain to run a wildly outlandish scenario, where we imagine how this can affect us but since it has been in a semi-coma for the last few days thanks to my bronchitis we will skip it for this week.
Looking at Theo van Vuuren over the past year we all expected him to change our fate and get this town back on its feet.
“If we listed to his advice then we will be ok,” is what I thought. Well it seems that his efforts where valiant indeed, however his good advice seemed to have fallen on deaf ears again.
A year of sabotage, vandalism, municipal debt, protests, and corruption has obviously made his job much harder than we all expected.
Imagine a sick person much like myself go to the doctor and pay for professional medical advice, get a prescription, go to the pharmacy, buy the medication, go home and the proceed to flush the pills down the drain and eat a packet of Jelly Tots instead. That sounds outlandish right? Yeah! Brain you did it you old rascal, you came through for me. That’ll do.
