Gone but not lost

Your subscription reminder letter addressed to Mr M Collins of Fresnaye refers. It is with regret that I advise that Michael has died as a result of motor neurone disease.
I can assure you that Michael was particularly orderly in planning his affairs, so it is no wonder that his subscription ended on his death.
As you say, he’s been a subscriber from day one, through good times and bad, so I’m sure he still nose where to find it.
As you also mention in your letter that the only blot on the horizon is that he might no longer be with us, I can assure you that, if at all possible, Michael will have found a copy and will read it from cover to cover.
Stuart Collins
Executor of Estate Late M Collins, Cape Town

Maybe we should leave one in his postbox - just in case. - Ed.



Give Nedbank a break

While I yield to nobody in my lack of sympathy for our banks, your cover story in nose77 is hardly a case of David vs Goliath. Here is a businessman who, in a grotesque attempt to outdo his rich Winelands neighbours, spends R60-million on property near Stellenbosch, sees his gat, then finds he cannot repay Nedbank R12m he borrowed. Boo fucking hoo!
Your story is told entirely from the mouth of the borrower. Anyone with some experience would guess that there may be other aspects to this tale.
For example: The French who were magically prepared to pay R49m and solve his financial predicament, but were “spooked” by the sale in execution, and then failed to even turn up at the auction; sounds like the classic bullshit which desperate borrowers throw at their creditors to buy time and stave off legal action.
You write that the French “would have bid if there had been an opportunity.” There was an opportunity: they knew well in advance that the property was going to be auctioned, but didn’t show. Another buyer (Mr Haskell) instructs his agents to bid on the property at auction, but does not tell them how much he is prepared to pay, so in the middle of the auction they have to run off to a nearby hilltop to get in cellphone contact with him…. Really! If I were the auctioneer, faced by such amateurish nonsense, I too would have gone on with the sale. It’s hardly surprising that the bank, too, eventually became gatvol and wanted their money back.
Maybe the judgment will confirm your one-sided view of this dispute, but bottom line is: who cares?
Jonathan Shuriya
Cape Town

You presume a lot. "Who cares?" you ask. All those people who have an overdraft at Nedbank, for a start. And then there's the fiduciary duty, many of us had assumed, banks owe to their clients. - Ed.


Ex trouble and strife

I read with horror of the plight of Frank Chilchik at the hands of his ex-wife, Janine Rose Ressel (nose77). I have one thing to say to Frank – kill the woman before she kills you!  
Ingrid Milne
Rabie Property Projects
Cape Town

A popular but not necessarily sensible view. – Ed.


Scabrous Scalabrino

I too have been on the receiving end of Magistrate Scalabrino’s belittling sarcasm. She asked me while perusing my expenses: “Why are you paying R680 a month into a retirement annuity, so you can retire in luxury?” and “Why do you need a TV?” (relating to the R21 a month licence fee I pay).
Yet not once did she ask my wife for proof of her understated salary or grossly exaggerated expenses.
My wife had some months earlier cleaned out the contents of our home while I was at work and moved in with her lover – she took the washing machine, but Scalabrino ordered me to contribute towards the maid who cleans my wife’s home and washes the clothes of her lover. I must wash mine in a bucket. I was ordered to pay towards their phone bill but my daughter can’t phone me because they never have airtime for her.
I too must pay for all school extra-mural activities, school wear, books etc. My wife is certainly not paying pro rata expenses.
The Family Advocate’s Court in Cape Town has displayed an even more disgusting bias in favour of the mother, to the extent of manipulating the words of my daughter to describe me as a poor father. I have the proof of this in an independent social worker’s report. The family advocate’s report is so full of invidious, unsubstantiated remarks about me that it must be libellous, yet it has the official stamp of the court. This document has entrenched incredible acrimony.
Who suffers the worst? My poor daughter.
Thank you Ms Scalabrino.
Name withheld
Cape Town
PS: Please withhold my identity as I will likely have to appear before her again.


Cape Town’s icons

The article “South Africa’s cultural locales” (nose77) alongside the article about the Sydney Opera House, made excellent and entertaining reading. After listing a number of edifices in South Africa, none of which actually qualifies for icon status or dignifies the city in which it is situated, Levin asks: “Is there any South African building that resonates such evocative and instantly identifiable purity of form? Yeah, one. Only it happens to be a flat topped mountain.”I would suggest there is another that warrants mention: Cape Town’s majestic flyover roads that end in midair. They should rate as an icon of our time – and a city that just can’t get it together.
V Rupping
Parow


Eskom’s shocking business

I would like to know why the CEO of Eskom cannot be forced to resign? Perhaps all the millions paid to him in salary, performance bonuses and restraint of trade agreements can then be paid to all the consumers in the Western Cape as a gesture to compensate them for the losses they have suffered.
On Monday 6 March, the Cape Times published a schedule of the load-shedding for the day and, right next to it, an article about the monopoly utility’s chairman’s remuneration.
The electricity failed to go off as “scheduled” – it never does.
Surely the CEO should be held responsible for the lack of planning, when he knew six years before the event that there was going to be an electricity crisis about now? He should not have put the technical people on early retirement and should have kept the other coal power stations on the go.
At the moment everyone’s getting the blame – except the real culprits.
Myrtle du Toit
Montague Gardens


The Wayde Baker case

As very well documented in your publication, my son, Wayde Baker, was beaten up very badly at a St John’s house party in April 2005.
We are presently involved in civil litigation in an attempt to get some financial compensation for the medical expenses we have had to incur in order to get Wayde’s face rebuilt. In the course of this litigation attorneys representing the defendants raised an exception to our particulars of claim. 
We were forced to argue this exception in court and had to concede. In addition to the exorbitant medical bills I have had to pay, the loss of my home and the tremendous hardships our family has been forced to endure as a result of the actions of the boys who attacked my son, I have now had to pay the wealthy parents of these boys their court costs: an additional sum of R56,000. I have just paid the boys for beating up my son!
To the boys and their parents, I would like to say the following:All I have ever wanted was an admission of guilt and compensation for our medical expenses. I receive no satisfaction as a result of the conviction of one boy whose silence was bought by the others.
These boys will not be able to move forward in their lives unless they repent and take responsibility for this dastardly deed. I have no doubt that in time the wheels of a higher form of justice will prevail.
Lynne Baker
Johannesburg


Cautionary Tale for Adults

It really fucks me up to say
what happened just the other day:
Innocent Jake, enticed by sin,forgot to use a latex skin
amnesiac re HIVs,
or over-trusting ARVs,
he was, shall we say, indiscreet,
and, caught up in the moment’s heat,
forgot the other’s point of view
as thoughtless people sometimes do.
The moral? No, there isn’t one
Men are entitled to their fun. 

Name withheld out of fear

Cape Town


Why’s Yengeni still out?

I would like to know how Tony Yengeni, whose appeal has been turned down, is still free:
 Driving a new supercharged black Range Rover Sports and a black Mercedes Benz 200 Kompressor.
 Keeping a mistress in an apartment in Bantry Bay.
 Playing golf at clubs round and about Cape Town.
Is this perhaps the new way that revered Heroes of the Struggle serve their prison sentences for corruption?
A Raucher
Sea Point

Yengeni’s appeal was turned down by the Pretoria High Court in November. In December he lodged an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal – and has managed to get the hearing of the application postponed to May. That’s how. – Ed.


Knock and drop

I was amazed by the strong action taken against Justus van der Hoven by the SA Heritage Resources Agency (nose77), as this is completely at odds with my sad experience with them.
On 4 March 2005 a notice appeared in the Springs Advertiser that an application had been received by the Provincial Heritage Resource Authority to demolish the buildings on erf 408 Springs and that any interested party could submit objections and comments within 30 days.
However on driving past the property on the same day, I found the buildings were already being demolished!
I immediately took photos of the destruction and then faxed a letter of objection together with the photos to the authority on 15 March 2005.
Needless to say I had no response and then sent a further fax on 2 June 2005, which suffered the same fate.
A motor dealer now trades from the site.
Hopefully you can find out why this illegal activity has been permitted by the authority.
Alan Taurog
Springs


In praise of tabloids

Rian Malan, when he pulls his pen out, proves again his status as a master of his craft. For me his article on press baron Deon du Plessis (nose76) conjured up memories of my late father, Jim Bailey.
Deon shares Jim’s independent up-yours approach, breaking the rules of the private school with its bullies and teacher’s pets that the broadsheet mainstream media has become.
Jim pioneered giving the people what they want with his Golden City Post, Africa’s first tabloid, which had a readership in excess of half a million – a black readership, that is, in the time of the Bantu education system. He was hated from the highest to the lowest echelons of the newspaper world.
Hats off to the brave, the free and the independent thinkers.
Beezy Bailey
Cape Town


Castle’s sell-by date

Why do you think that Castle Lager has its sell-by date at the bottom of each can in code, while Windhoek’s is in plain English?
I thought it was the public’s right to know when a product had reached its expiry date. But, of course, I may be wrong.
Paul Scheepers
Plettenberg Bay


NEWS FLASH!
drivel - by Gus Ferguson

Less is moreish (more or less)

Readers may be interested in a series of courses run by the celebrated academic, Dr Morton Tsepo Le Grange.
His popular seminars demonstrate the economic merits of poor service, wastage, idleness, sabotage, theft, prevarication and other forms of counter-productivity.
Inefficiency, he maintains, is a virtue that increases the need for more work and more jobs, which is exactly what the country needs.
Le Grange is an associate professor of Bureaucratic Studies at the Neo-Luddite University of Alberta.
His 2005 series of conferences on this subject caused a 3% drop in the Canadian GNP.
Details of his courses in South Africa should be on his website when it is finally up and running.
- Gus

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