Brian Molefe has already caused some snorts of disbelief as the newly appointed interim CEO of our near monopoly State electricity utility by promising to fix all its woes by the end of the year.
Brian Molefe has already caused some snorts of disbelief as the newly appointed interim CEO of our near monopoly State electricity utility by promising to fix all its woes by the end of the year.
I am sure he believes he can. He displays little self-doubt.
When I was the director of research organisation BusinessMap and Molefe was head of the powerful Public Investment Corporation, investor of government pension fund money, we invited him to one of our breakfasts to address fund managers and other financial types.
Those mostly white money men (and they are mostly men) were expecting him to talk about the PIC, and we thought he could give us a view on whether PIC shareholding counted as Black Economic Empowerment. Instead, he quoted reams of Pablo Neruda's poetry about poverty.
After he finished, I thanked him and said I preferred Neruda's love poems, quoting in Spanish the opening line, "Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche," from Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair.
The event was bizarre, and tells you something about Brian Molefe's personality.
I suppose I should have been grateful for the surprise breakfast poetry reading.
It’s good to know that someone in a position of power has literary taste, and even more pleasing is it that a person in authority keeps in mind the plight of the poor.
This was a breakfast for those concerned about money, however, part of our attempt to earn our living as a research organisation.
Money and poetry are uneasy bedfellows. WB Yeats’s poem The Choice talks of the choice human intellect is forced to make between “perfection of the life, or of the work.”
Those who choose “the work” of pursuit of some higher calling will have to refuse material comfort.
In the end, Yeats says, the choice forced on us is never satisfying.
That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
Need it be that these two essential drivers of human thought and action are always in conflict?
Material and non-material needs play out in all but those who have no choice at all, because their material circumstances are so lacking.
The tension is found in journalism, the profession, trade or craft I have spent too much time working at.
Universities, too, grapple with the clash between the material and non-material imperatives.
The essence of the university is not to be found in the buildings, the campus amenities, government accreditation, the staff or the students, but in something much more amorphous and nonetheless real:
the disputatious, unrelenting, never-quite-satisfied search for truth.
Yet without staff, students, buildings and all the rest universities do not have substance.
Journalism in most of the West has been closely associated with a quest for a mass audience to sell to advertisers.
It has, in my experience worked best in a business environment.
Yet without the search for verifiable truth, without the urge to publish what makes the powerful uncomfortable, journalism has little meaning.
We could easily do without it. The worst journalists I encountered were those who confused cynicism and skepticism and concerned themselves only with what sells.
The problem for journalism is that keeping body and soul together, in the West at least, is becoming increasingly difficult.
Technological trends seem to be killing off newspapers, magazines and even threatening the once apparently unassailable TV channels.
In South Africa, the Print media is shedding staff, as newspapers lose buyers and advertisers.
Cost-cutting to cope with lower income threatens quality, which in turn could lose even more readers, in a vicious spiral of churnalism.
Journalism could be replaced on the one hand by the tumultuous rumour and factoid factory that Twitter, Facebook and some websites have become, and on the other by slick and one-sided corporate communication.
Universities have to cope with increasing managerialism, and greater numbers of students without commensurate increase in state funding.
Unlike newspapers, the danger is not that they will disappear but that they will gradually morph into glorified technical colleges.
Economic uncertainty and volatility around the world worsen the threat that quality, as defined by the writer Robert Pirsig in his metaphysics of quality, will be sacrificed to quantity.
The marvellous biblical mistranslation, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” comes to mind.
On the other hand, ignoring material needs entirely leads to perdition.
Sometimes the prose must take precedence over the poetry.
Journalists have to figure out how to make their vocations pay.
Academics have to take on the managers.
The hum-drum business of just making things work is much harder than dreaming big, but it’s necessary.
Which is why it good to know that Mr Molefe is not a dreamer, but has a history of getting things done.
Let’s hope he can keep the literal lights burning as brightly as the literary ones he admires.
* Reg Rumney is the director of the South African Reserve Bank Centre for Economics Journalism in Africa at Rhodes University.
Read previous columns at www.grocotts.co.za/columns/On-The-Money
