The Grocott’s Mail newsroom has selected Makana Municipal Manager, Dr Pravine Naidoo, as our 2013 Newsmaker of the Year.
The Grocott’s Mail newsroom has selected Makana Municipal Manager, Dr Pravine Naidoo, as our 2013 Newsmaker of the Year.
He was chosen because he is the personality who has enjoyed the highest profile on our pages in the past 12 months, with several articles about him and his escapades appearing on the front page of this newspaper.
His first appearance in 2013 came in the wake of last year’s dismissal of his predecessor, Ntombi Baart. As early as January, there were rumours circulating that Naidoo might be returning to Makana to reclaim his old job.
This prospect was in itself controversial because when Naidoo left Makana in 2008 he sued the municipality for loss of income. He believed he was still the best candidate for the job.
Even though he lost the labour court case he took it up on appeal and, as far as we could ascertain, the legal dispute had not yet been resolved when he was interviewed for the position.
When Naidoo was appointed at the beginning of April, we welcomed him back on the strength of his double doctorate in municipal management, together with a book he had written on the subject. We doubted that anyone in the world could have such convincing qualifications for the municipal manager job.
Grocott’s Mail immediately sent in several requests for an interview with him, as we were keen to know how he was going to fix this decaying municipality.
Our requests were ignored for protocol reasons – it was up to the mayor to introduce the new MM to the town.
This wasn't done, so we have never found out how he intends to improve efficiency in the municipality.
In spite of having such a massively qualified accounting officer, the already poor service delivery in Makana has deteriorated even further.
Naidoo hit the front page of Grocott’s Mail when he signed a memorandum of understanding with Rhodes University on behalf of the municipality. The main purpose of this MoU was to improve the monitoring of service delivery.
We have reason to believe that a more extensive MoU between the two entities has been signed, but unfortunately this document has not been made public.
A number of mysteries followed Naidoo through to his offices in City Hall.
For example, why did Council hire him if he was pursuing his case against the Municipality?
Why did he accept the job at Makana Municipality if he was offered R300 000 more at Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality?
Why did he not sign his contract and performance agreement until he had been working at the municipality for more than six months?
The most fascinating controversy surrounding the MM is the recent one concerning a commitment by the Council Speaker to pay him R3 million plus his legal fees in settlement of his case against the municipality. Ultimately, it is this last issue that has earned Naidoo a precautionary suspension that is still in effect at the time of writing.
These are some of the reasons why we chose Dr Pravine Naidoo as the Grocott’s Mail Newsmaker of the year for 2013.
There were other candidates in the running, but in the end it was a rather simple decision.
Not surprisingly, our sports editor nominated a sports personality, Rhodes University student Natalie Ross for the newsmaker title. In August she won a gold medal in her age-group of the world duathlon championship. She won the 20-24 age category and was 12th woman overall in the age-group champs.
Yet another candidate for the newsmaker of the year accolade was Kelsey-Rae Lawrence. She only appeared on our front page once – but did so with such aplomb that she had to be in the running for the title. Dressed in bath towels and slippers, Lawrence quickly became known as the ‘shower-girl’ in our newsroom because the placard she carried alongside the Vice Chancellor in a protest march against water cuts informed onlookers that all she wanted was a shower.
One of our reporters nominated ‘water outages’ as a newsmaker of the year. But we had specifically declared that only individual humans qualified for the title, so ‘water outages’ could not be declared newsmaker of the year even though it would easily win if the vote was for a ‘news issue’ of the year.
Sadly, several other strong candidates for the title did not make the final round of voting. We had to leave behind Mayor Zamuxolo Peter, municipal spokesman Mncedisi Boma, the speaker, Rachel Madinda-Isaacs and police spokesperson, Captain Mali Govender, who would easily have won if we had simply counted up the number of mentions in the newspaper.
