Dear valued employees: You're not quite bright enough for this

I like the word "insouciant" because it is a rather big word and, when I use it, people tend to think that I must be very clever.

So I'm going to use it quite a bit today. Now, just in case you're not as clever as I am, the dictionary defines insouciance, more or less, as "doing whatever you like and bugger what anyone else thinks".

In South Africa we have insouciance in spades. Nkandla was insouciance on a very large scale, all R246-million of it, and Dina Pule was the pin-up girl of political insouciance.

Now the mob running the Tsogo Sun have joined the insouciance society.

In case you missed it, SABMiller have owned 40% of Tsogo Sun but now they've decided that they're going to stick to their knitting. So they're flogging their shares in Tsogo. Until now you couldn't buy Tsogo shares for love nor money because 90% of the them were owned by just four shareholders. With Breweries selling out, there will now be a reasonable number of shares available to buy.

We clever investment types also talk about price to earnings ratios and Tsogo's p:e is at a discount to that of its main rival, which suggests that it is relatively cheap. So the five head honchos at Tsogo have got the company to hand over to them interest-free loans amounting to R20-million so that they can buy themselves a stack of shares in the business.

And, best of all, they have to pay the money back only when they feel like it. The MD gets R86-million and even the personnel director gets R20-million. Such no-strings attached corporate largesse is somewhat unusual, to say the least, which is why the pesky Business Day asked the company why "only five executives were chosen and what they had done to deserve the facility".

What's wrong with the rest of your staff, the nosy paper wanted to know.

Business Day calculated that if only half the R200-million kitty were divided between Tsogo's 9000-odd employees they would each be able to buy shares worth about R10 500. So, in response to the paper's annoying questioning, the bosses at Tsogo got the PR kiepies to say the following (which is insouciance of the wildest sort): "The interest-free nature of the loans will result in fringe-benefits tax on the executives, which absorbs most of their salary. This, together with facing downside risk on the shares, means it is not suitable for all employees, despite the upside potential. The purpose of the facility is to enable executives to acquire Tsogo shares to align the interests of executive management with those of Tsogo Sun and its shareholders."

And just imagine what Tsogo workers must think of their betters' suggestion that interest-free loans aren't for them because they're too thick to understand that share prices can go down as well as up.

The insouciance of some people!