Tax refund is meaningful 'sorry'

A friend and I were both going to be in the same part of Johannesburg at the same time last week so we arranged to meet for lunch.

Because we had both been working extremely hard, we decided to treat ourselves to an extortionately expensive restaurant; the one that solicits custom by telling its target market to "remind yourself why you work so hard".

It's an establishment that is off-the-scale expensive and usually only patronised by men in suits with big expense accounts and even bigger bonuses; not the entrepreneurial riffraff embodied by my friend and I.

We were both extremely hungry. I ordered a piece of cow, medium, with chips and a side order of creamed spinach. My friend, though, was very, very hungry, and said he would take up the house's special of the day: pretty much a whole cow, on the bone.

When our orders arrived, we fell to with relish. We sliced and chewed in silence. The waiter arrived to ask whether we were happy with our meals. We nodded but, with a wadge of beef in his cheek and pointing towards his creamed spinach, my friend said he wasn't particularly happy with "that".

The "that" in question was a strip of plastic in the spinach. The waiter was horrified. He apologised profusely. The manager was sent for. He bowed and scraped, he spluttered and bowed and scraped some more. He was horrified that such a calamity could befall us and wondered out loud how he could make it up to us. (I thought to myself that 20 push-ups would set matters to right, but the plastic wasn't in my spinach so I kept that counsel to myself.) My friend explained that we didn't want the proffered free coffees and didn't have time for complimentary cognacs and desserts but thank you, anyway.

When the bill arrived the manager genuflected some more. We explained that we knew perfectly well where the plastic had come from: the spinach came in plastic bags, the tops of which were usually snipped off and thrown away, but that this time the plastic ended up on a plate. No big deal - it's not like it was a used condom or a bit of dead rat - and, anyway, the boss had done a world-class job of apologising. Matter closed.

Apologies have been big news recently. The people who connect to what they believe is the real world with their BlackBerrys have been frothing because BlackBerry didn't apologise loudly or long enough about cutting them off.

Rupert Murdoch has famously joined the Apology Brigade. Last week the big boss of JP Morgan was grovelling away and, mostly famously, the BP head honcho publicly mea-culpa'd for polluting the Gulf of Mexico. (The really funny thing was that he even had to apologise for his apology. Because of all the ructions he had to deal with, BP Dude said: "I want my life back". Oops. This was a most unfortunate pronouncement given the fact that 11 of his employees died in the explosion that caused the oil spill.)

In South Africa, Cabinet ministers plot and schlenter to line their own pockets. The president has unprotected sex with a young woman in between collecting half a dozen wives. He apologises and is forgiven. A top ANC spokesman gets done for drunken driving. He apologises and is back on the job. The intelligence minister's wife is recruiting drug mules but he never says: "Sorry, I should have known and am clearly not up to the job of being intelligence minister."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu wants government to apologise for not letting his monk friend come to his party, and now Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale expects his party to simply accept Julius Malema's pronouncements on Botswana so that he can be absolved and go on driving away foreign investment and jobs.

Most of the banking plonkers who got the world into its current economic crisis got away with nothing more than a half-hearted apology. In South Africa no one says sorry every time a police bigwig gives a pal a massive office lease or the auditor-general finds another department or municipality has been playing fast and loose with public finances. It's got so bad that even the cricket authorities are in on the wheeze.

I'm sorry but President Jacob Zuma, you must go and meet Steakhouse Guy and let him teach you a thing or two about meaningful apologies. Oh, and if you wouldn't mind, I'd like some of my tax money back please.