Just last
week Tidemarks complained that President Cyril was travelling overseas too
much. Some one really ought to take his passport away and make him stay at home
and visit the many places where our country is burning. Starting with the
streets of Pretoria.
It not as if
he’s doing a scrap of good swanning about at these conferences hobnobbing with
other leaders who by now have learned exactly who he is – a mendicant in search
of handouts on the basis that we are a cute nation where Nelson Mandela lived.
Infamously this week a foreign journo who had been asked to supply names to caption
a pic of world leaders gave up when she reached Pres. Cyril’s gleaming visage
and labelled him “another world leader”!
While the
accountancy challenged amongst us naively believe that an entity where
liabilities exceed assets should be declared insolvent, every enterprise in
this position can produce a bouillabaisse of words, numbers and opinions proving
the exact opposite. While this seems to produce the desired comfort for reassuring
most staff, suppliers and clients, it really ought not convince those entrusted
with caring for other people’s money. It is amazing how often the trustees and
fund managers of funds collected from the most vulnerable and poor of our
community seem to pick these lame ducks as investment targets. The Government Employees Pensions fund bailing
out ESKOM comes to mind. May this NOT end in tears, please.
It’s requires
a very special talent to drive a trading desk surrounded by screens ceaselessly
delivering numbers, words and pictures of talking heads. One must respond to anything
that’s just the slightest bit different from what it was seconds earlier. Currently
a new fearsome hazard to prudent decision-making has turned up : A garrulous
omniscient media-wise US president with an opinion on everything. This week he
seemed to be baiting the Chinese and there must be some dealers who this week
considered early retirement, growing turnips on a small holding. Even from a disinterested
distance it looked very messy as Trump apparently changed his stance regularly
The sadly
deluded and probably now mentally disturbed young Swedish girl Greta Thunberg has
arrived in the USA to lecture anyone with the will to listen, about climate change
or something. She has become the figurehead for the enormously enraged but equally
ignorant lobby groups who are convinced that something should be done but can’t
produce robust evidence to prove what that should be. The usual suspect in the
shouting matches is the ubiquitous but mostly innocuous carbon dioxide gas and
it just so happens that Greta’s mother, an opera singer, has claimed that her
daughter can see carbon dioxide gas as it spews from any industrial chimney. This
politically useful but scientifically dubious skill must make living amongst
the rest of us who exhale this gas in copious quantities rather foggy. Unfortunately,
for her cause she has arrived just as Trump is busy trashing some of his predecessor’s
carbon legislation.
Also changing
her mind is the Durban Lady Mayor who was either booted or quit while a small
matter of big money flowing in unusual directions was sorted out. But before
that investigation even got under way, the lady went to Luthuli House (the ANC headquarters)
for a sympathetic ear and an inspiring pep talk which changed her mind. She
returned to Durban and demanded her chair back. The politics here on the edge
of the Indian ocean is deep and troublesome and services to ratepayers gets
little attention while gravy train tickets are being fought over
It is amazing
just how engaged and knowledgeable Springbok rugby fans are. Debate about the squad
that has been selected to go to the World Cup is heated and mostly interesting.
My miserable contribution is that sentiment and politics should not overrule
injury and age.
James Greener
Friday 30th August 2019
PS thank you to all
who spotted the birth notice for our first grandchild Penelope Nora
