It says a lot about Phathiswa Magopeni that she didn't want to talk about her new position as the SABC's latest head of news and current affairs until she had formally ended the notice period at her former employer.
Never mind that she had already left eNCA, that her appointment had been officially announced, or even that the DStv channel had helped the Sunday Times make contact with her; to Magopeni it was all about "respect for both companies".
She is proper like that. The very night she resigned, she started her binge-watching of SABC TV, from 5pm to 10pm every day, notebook and pen in hand, and also upped her listening to its radio stations, just to be 100% sure she was ready for action.
She started at the SABC on March 1, but days before, her large Filofax was already filled with details, in her neat handwriting, of what she planned to do on day one.
"For instance, paying attention to how we look on air doesn't need a committee. Almost everybody agrees we need to work on our on-air graphics because that's our image."
FOUNDATION OF COMPETENCE
She intends to use in-house designers for this, rather than outsourcing or being surrounded by the comfort of loyal supporters.
"If you come with a trailer of [outside] people you are basically saying to these people: 'I don't have confidence in you.' Despite the squabbles that have gone on at the SABC, there is a level below that has held things together and you have to appreciate that. There hasn't been a single day when the public broadcaster was off air."
Magopeni has no illusions about what she faces. She is walking into a job previously held by Snuki Zikalala, Phil Molefe, Jimi Matthews and Simon Tebele - all of whom left, voluntarily or involuntarily, with a lot of drama.Magopeni 's new boss, Chris Maroleng, replaced chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng, who is still fighting his dismissal at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration. Motsoeneng was fired for violating the SABC's code of conduct when he criticised its decision to stop his policy on 90% local music content. He was also excoriated by the public protector in the wake of a R10-million bonus scandal.
Maroleng, who previously worked alongside Magopeni as Africa editor of eNCA, has a mandate to depoliticise the SABC in its entirety; Magopeni's mission is to do the same in the newsroom.
"What I have to deal with is a product of what happened previously, but now I am responsible for it," she says. "I have to take responsibility for whatever happened and that becomes my starting point because if I am going to make any difference I need to acknowledge everything that has happened.
"The mandate I have been given is to depoliticise the newsroom and shield it from all sorts of interests, not only political interests. Political contamination is going to be difficult to deal with because you still have some of those people embedded in the system, but I don't play politics. I don't do royal clubs. You are as good as your next story, not your previous story because that has passed, and that is how I treat people in my teams.
"Journalists invite themselves into factions and they fall in love with politicians, as in 'I like so-and-so's idea' and they start elevating politicians - as in this [President] Cyril Ramaphosa euphoria you see in the media. It is good to have hope and we don't want to be party poopers, but we must remember we are still going to hold Cyril to account. The fact that the January 8 statement started on time and the media was raving about this guy who is going to do things differently ... it's a good narrative but that's not the story. The media's role is not to celebrate such non-issues."
TOO MANY 11-HOUR DAYS
After her SABC-intensive over the past few weeks, she has clear goals of what she wants to achieve: provide the regional coverage that goes with being a public broadcaster; stop focusing on political stories only and tell the socioeconomic ones too; stop relying on the same easy rent-a-quotes; find women experts; and what she refers to as "talent management".
She brings up the incident when presenter Peter Ndoro mistakenly announced on air that Ramaphosa had died, instead of Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. It was Ndoro's second on-air mistake in about a month but Magopeni is quick to point out mitigating factors.
"The entire issue around [him] is talent management," she says. "Peter had been on air for 11 hours that day. You are compromising the quality of the output because these people are exhausted and at some point they are going to crash, and what do you do?"
Knowing what to do is the experience she has gained from her positions at eNCA, most recently as business and economics editor and head of terrestrial news services; plus qualifications such as her MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science and the PhD in business administration she is now working towards, which focuses on the financial viability of journalism in South Africa across all platforms.
But what probably helped clinch her the SABC job - after she was approached by a headhunting agency in mid-September - are the qualities not listed on her CV. She has an infectious sense of childlike wonder ("Wow!" is a ready response), is a mesmerising storyteller, has a gutsy laugh, can use her voice with animation and varied pitch as if she were a trained actor, and takes difficulties in her stride.Magopeni grew up in Tsomo in the Eastern Cape, where she was in the first matric class of 12 at Zwelixolile Senior Secondary School, a makeshift school in the village's four-roomed clinic. Every Friday, along with her schoolbag, she carried a plastic bag full of fresh cow dung to clean the classroom floors with.
Her mother died giving birth to her fifth child when Magopeni was eight. The family was split up and Magopeni stayed with an elder brother, who was mostly away at boarding school, and a younger brother she took care of. A married relative popped in occasionally to check on them.
FINDING HARMONY
Despite having had no formal music classes, she loved singing and decided to study music after school but was rejected by the University of Cape Town for not having the required theoretical background. Instead she studied teaching at the University of the Western Cape. Later she lectured at both institutions.
Her Facebook profile picture juxtaposes Magopeni with a photo of her late father, Masokodwa. "I love the fact that among my siblings I'm the only one with that strong resemblance, including physique and height," she says. He was a migrant worker in Cape Town and could not travel home frequently - there was a gap when she did not see him for four years - but for most of her first year at university she lived with her father at a men's hostel in Langa.
She recounts sharing that small space where even the floor between the two narrow beds wasn't suitable for sleeping because her father's elderly roommate used to get up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. So she would slide into the space under her father's bed.
After another "unworkable" living space of a leaking shack in a relative's Gugulethu backyard, plus daily pleadings at the station to get onto a train to Bellville without a ticket, often sleeping overnight in the 24-hour varsity study space to ensure she was on campus to write tests, she finally moved into a university residence in her third year but without any food provision.
At weekends, Magopeni would tell her fellow students she was visiting relatives in the townships but instead would make her way to the suburbs to find piece jobs washing and ironing clothes, to make enough money to feed herself.NO TIME TO RELAX
She tells her life story without malice or bitterness. Neither does she use it as a calling card. It's just what happened, she says.
She now has three sons and is married to Wilmot Magopeni, a general manager in the banking sector. She calls herself "the queen in the house".
She is up at 3am, even on weekends, to work on her PhD. It helps that she is an efficient sleeper who needs only five hours a night. To boost her energy she goes to gym four times a week, twice with a personal trainer.
"Actually I don't think we push our bodies enough," she says. "Even if I don't feel like doing any academic readings, I still wake up and go to the place where I should be sitting and just read other stuff."
The only time she is stumped is when I ask her about relaxing. Silence. "I hardly relax. It's got to a point where my eight-year-old, whenever he sees me sitting and doing nothing, asks: 'Mom, are you fine, do you want something to read?' I think it's bad for them that they don't think I should be sitting idle."
And any vices? With a smile, as if she were playing the role of a wicked witch in a storybook, she says: "I can be nasty. I am not a pushover. I'm kind and I love people - until they disappoint me. When I decide to take you on, I do it thoroughly. It's not something I do all the time, but I have been pushed to different levels at different times."..