AS A NEWSPAPER editor I am blessed with wonderful colleagues. In this business, as in most no doubt, the moment you’re the boss and you start thinking you’re the smartest guy in the room you’re in loads of trouble.

My job is to make other, smarter, journalists famous and over the years, particularly on the opinion and editorial pages of Business Day, I have tried to do that. I think it’s paid off too.

One of those colleagues is my friend Tim Cohen. He is far and away the most widely informed and opinionated guy I know. He told me once that his dad used to force him to argue with him. He wasn’t allowed not to have an opinion about things. The result is a writer who is in thought mode all the time and when The Weekender closed I moved as fast as possible to ensure his fabulous Weekender column moved on to Business Day.

It was Tim who, as he does so often, stated the obvious the other day and asked why we were not thinking of at least partially privatising Eskom. Well, why aren’t we?

Eskom is asking this economy for so much money to build the power staions it says it needs to provide it with electricity that we may not be able to afford it. Not, at least, if we also want to have a national health insurance scheme at the same time.

But if you floated 45% of it you could probably raise the finance from private investors. With tariffs rising as quickly as they are there’d be great interest in a piece of Eskom. Then you could also get them to run it (saving the acting chairman and acting CEO — the same guy) from having to fill the CEO job at least.

And, as the South African state, you get to keep shareholder control! What more would the Government want?

A debate about privatisation now would be very different to what it was in the mid-nineties, when it was ideological. Now it would be practical.  When you have to spend more than R200bn on electricity just to keep up with your expected economic growth, the right thing to do is to get someone else to pay for it. At the moment we seem to be talking only about how Eskom, itself, can come up with the money.

But we should, as Tim Cohen argued in Business Day this week, be changing the debate and not allowing the obvious benefits of a partial privatisation to be drowned in the silly rhetoric of the Left and the ‘youth’.

My other stroke of luck was offering Jacob Dlamini a job as Political Editor of Business Day in about 2003. He didn’t stay long as he hankered for academia in the US, but he has stayed with us as a columnist.

I don’t know whether you read him in The Weekender but I’ve brought him onto Business Day as well and let me tell you this guy is on song at the moment. His two most recent columns, on Julius Malema and, this week, the sate of our schools, are beyond mere brilliance.

I urge you to follow Dlamini. His is an increasingly powerful voice and his new book, Native Nostalgia (Jacana), out in time for Xmas, is just wonderful. You can’t miss it — it’s pink with glittery silver writing on the cover.  It asks, and then answers in the most glorious prose, an intrgiguing question; “What if you were black  and a happy child under apartheid?”

It isn’t something all South Africans would want to deal with and he has already been called a kind of racist by black commentators. But Dlamini has what they don’t have — moral courage.  I like to think it’s why he sticks with us on Business Day. It is most certainly why we stick with him.

Cheers

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