Are you picking up this redeployment is rubbish?

24 July 2013 - 02:30 By Peter Delmar
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I'm not sure who collected my rubbish this past Friday, but somebody did. Whoever it was, thank you very much.

After I put out the rubbish in my bucolic, leafy street on Friday I happened to walk past the remote TV screen that shows the entrance to our little Xanadu.

I was in the kitchen to make myself a cup of freshly brewed coffee on the nifty machine I scored, rather unexpectedly, for Father's Day. The gas heater was pumping warmth into the kitchen. I'd already had a bowl of Pronutro. (I eat it with hot milk, although Wife and the kids think this is barbaric.) Outside it was freezing cold.

The grainy image on the TV display showed that, as usual, a poor person was rummaging through my garbage looking for bits and pieces that might be of some recyclable value. A solid steel gate that is opened at the touch of a button and is topped by electric fencing, separated me and my warm, white bourgeois little world with its freshly brewed coffee from the poor man picking in midwinter through the discarded waste of an affluent society. For a moment I thought of good King Wenceslas.

Unless I have early-start Outlook meeting requests (for which I usually find an excuse not to make myself available), I never find myself in rush-hour traffic. Working from home as I do, I hardly ever claim consumables as a tax-allowable expense but, since I got the coffee machine I find that clients and suppliers are much more interested in meeting at my place than they used to be. So, the other day, I sent my accountant an invoice for a purchase of those nifty little coffee pods that slot into the machine. (She recently complained that my tea and coffee claims had gone up by all of R6 year on year.)

At the end of the week the spent little plastic pods are discarded along with all the other detritus of my consumerist existence, and some nice people come and take it away to fill up holes in the ground in places like Alberton or Mondeor where, seemingly, they have holes in the ground that need filling. For this service I pay a fee, which goes towards the costs of diesel, the repayments on those big rubbish-guzzling trucks and the wages of the men who do the dirty every day.

Last Friday I wasn't sure who took my rubbish away because workers at the Johannesburg municipal refuse agency, Pikitup, were on strike. Or at least some of them were, annoyed and upset that they had been denied transport allowances to and from work. While I sipped my coffee and did some work in my balmy little office, somebody came and emptied the bin.

I'm sorry that some people have to sit in traffic for hours on end every work day on their way to their jobs. I'm even sorrier that many more people don't have jobs at all. And I'm sorry that some people have to hang off rubbish trucks, jump off and sprint down the road, block after block, to heave rubbish bins into the backs of those trucks. And I'm amazed at how, for the most part, these people are hard-working, effective and seemingly cheerful. So when these people are denied transport allowances to get to and from their places of work at ungodly hours of the day, I feel a twinge of sympathy.

But when I read that the former boss of Pikitup, who left under a cloud, has been "redeployed" to an obscure government agency running rural communications, I can't help but think just how medieval we have become.

I am the modern-day equivalent of a Middle Ages bourgeois trader or guildsman. My lot in life is infinitely better than those of the toiling, hungry serfs who, clad in rags, scrabble a miserable existence from the frozen ground. But none of us has any political clout. As in days of yore, the state exists to support the king, his family and his circle of noblemen.

When one of the wicked king's courtiers causes a hooha by ravishing the daughter of a neighbouring count, it is simply hushed up because the king remembers the loyalty said count displayed by lending him his favourite charger during last season's hunt in Sherwood Forest.

Seriously though, can anyone outside of the royal circle explain to me what supposed logic informs the deployment of the city's chief dustman to a position running sophisticated wireless communications?

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