AN ADVERT in the Sunday Independent yesterday caught my eye. It was placed by a businessman in the Western Cape. It said he ran a small business and that he was selling off his cars — no doubt prized assets as they are big SUV, a hybrid and an SLK — in order to build up a cash reserve that would enable him to preserve jobs in his company should the current recession not, as it appears to be doing, recover quickly.

In the advert, he challenged Trevor Manuel and the rest of the Cabinet to trade in their luxury (mostly German) cars and buy cheaper ones. He suggested hybrids like, I suppose, the Toyota Prius or something from Lexus. Not a bad idea with the Copenhagen conference approaching.

The thing is this: it is not too late to trade in these cars. We don’t have to live with the insult that they are to our intelligence. I don’t mean to pick on Manuel, but his R1,2m BMW, or the ones bought for Siphiwe Nyanda or Blade Nzimande, could be traded in today for about R900000. A new Toyota Prius (especially if the whole Cabinet went green) could be discounted down to about R300000, allowing each minister to give R600000 back to the Treasury. Those ministers who travel rougher roads could do so equally well in a Nissan X- Trail as in a BMW X5. Better even.

In all, the guy who paid for the advert (I know who he is and respect his decision to remain anonymous) reckons a wholesale trade-in and repurchase of cheaper but good cars by ministers would save about R15m. The money could be given back to the Treasury or used to create a lasting memorial against waste in our society — a fantastic school for rural autistic children, perhaps. Or an endowment to fund a chair of ethics at one of our universities.

The current ministerial cars were bought with money collected from taxpayers. If the ministers being driven in them had a shred of political humility or sincerity, they would trade down now. I am sick of hearing from the ANC that the “poorest of the poor” must be the focus of policy. They don’t mean it. If they do, the cars would be a painless way to prove it.

THANK YOU to the many people who have called or written to express their sorrow at the passing of The Weekender. I don’t know what to say other than that I take responsibility for some decisions which, if I had the chance over again, I would not take. It is over now, so it is probably pointless labouring the thing.

But one thing is clear — the market for quality in SA is there. Some people say the internet is the way to get to it but I don’t think that’s the only way. Wanted, our Business Day monthly subscriber supplement, has been a howling success. Business Day itself is absolutely fine.

Getting to the market takes real business stamina, though. Among the things that bedevilled The Weekender were the fact that we tried to keep late deadlines to catch the news and, thus, had to pay high distribution costs because we couldn’t piggyback on other publications.

With hindsight, we should have walked away from the news entirely and printed very early on Fridays and distributed on Saturday mornings with the established morning papers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. By the time we proposed the latter, though, the shareholders had had enough.

Those mistakes were mine. The others? One day, I promise, I’ll write the book.

SO the “Springboks” got slaughtered by a depleted English club. Surprise! I am lucky enough to have a column in SA Rugby magazine. You have to write a month ahead and in next month’s issue you’ll find yours truly arguing (two weeks ago now) that coach Peter de Villiers chose a third team to dirt-track and that he’d argue it was a way of finding out who he didn’t want in he World Cup squad. Blow me down if I didn’t read the following quote from him in Rapport yesterday: “I know after this game that there are players who won’t play for South Africa again.” I missed the game, fortunately. I find it’s best not to watch while coaches pick their teams on my TV.

Popularity: unranked [?]