Brewed Bitumen

Back in the late 1980s, a brewery sponsored a huge outdoor festival in New Brighton, Gqeberha. A hundred or so musicians converged from all over South Africa, in minibus and coaches. This massively expensive multi-band concert, featuring 110 musicians, from all corners of the country, was a disaster. All day, there were fewer people in the audience than on the stage.

Some months later, a brewery rep arrived in New Brighton, unannounced, bearing crates of beer. He sat with a township gent. A beer or two on, he casually mentioned that posters were sent to New Brighton to advertise a recent show at the nearby stadium.

“Yes, yes” said his host, quite self-importantly. “Let me show you”. The booze rep was ushered into room where he found bales of posters, still tightly bound with plastic straps. In true, apartheid-era agent provacateur fashion, the rep wondered why the posters were never unpacked.

“We waited for the ladder. We didn’t have one. But, the posters came with cases and cases of beer, and … well, time just flew by”.

The rep stuck around in New Brighton for a few days, visiting one old township guy after the other. The story was much the same, in each home. That was the veterans’ story. In this case, they were veteran township musicians.

The story in Johannesburg corroborated: a self-styled queen of jazz in an upper-Eloff Street buidling had insisted to the brewery that they did not need to spend an arm and a leg erecting posters to advertise the massively expensive concert.

“Our own people will do it”

She was proud of her job creation effort. Phone calls later, bundles of posters were shipped from Johannesburg. Did the jazz queen know that a generous beer allowance went with the posters? We will never know.

Maybe it is unfair to feature beer in this story. It may have had nothing to do with the outcome. I say this because, forty years later, the veterans-pothole story says nothing about beer, but the potholes and poster outcomes are the same.

A veteran is a guy who sits at home on a chair. That is what veterans usually do, and neither the devil nor forty horsemen will normally budge them off it. It makes no difference what they retired from: township muso or soldier.

The moral of the story is not “please outsource pothole repairs”, it is, don’t give veterans things to do and expect outcomes.

Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.