Forbes and Twitter: The Happenings
Forget the nomenclature. Forbes 30 under 30 is a very serious platform which most of us do not understand, will not understand. When you talk Forbes you are talking big money, high standards and apologetic ministers. The Forbes office was met with an apology of sorts that went something like ‘those lofty standards cannot work here. We are pleading with Forbes to lower their threshold otherwise we are likely to get a Forbes 0 under 30 situation’. The somewhat loquacious minister who has been uncharacteristically mute in Parliament lately seems to have come back more rejuvenated. And as she argued the case for locals I thought I saw a tattoo on her neck that said something like ‘minister: now new and improved’. And she won!
Main Mall which is now essentially a place where government enclave employees buy cooked tripe from ladies with big pots came alive and half the GC citizens were happy as pockets bulged from the Forbes 30 spin-offs. Sorry Forbes 30 under 30 - this takes getting used to and I hope by the time I get to the end of the column, I’d be on the right lane. Main Mall basically got its groove back.
Our country has been shorn of excitement for some time and Forbes provided an opportunity to amp the excitement. Cab drivers got over-excited and brought out their milkevery-opportunity-for-what-it-is-worth armoury. Their cash registers which are usually a dirty little bag (which has never seen water ever since it left the factory) or an ashtray started registering 3-digit figures.
The initial feedback of the summit is peppered with phrases like ‘waste of time’, ‘too expensive’, ‘wrong delegates’, ‘paid holiday’ etc. Us layman wait to hear the report of how that eminent summit panned out. We are not clued up enough to distil the issues but there’s a designated national grill master, Omphile Sehurutshe who anchors a Btv show called ‘The Eye’. This is like the national test for everything gone right or wrong. The guest must have their ducks in a neat row and their thinking hat on. If you come with a little thinking beanie you will be in for a very long evening and you might return to find a dismissal letter on your desk.
And of course the ‘we learnt something’ choristers are just tuning up to belt out the now famous tune. From my experience once you hear anybody say ‘we learnt something’ after any type of event know that objectives and goals were not met. In fact, I think ‘we learnt something’ is code for ‘we are not good enough’. I’ve heard this many times than I care to count in football especially during continental assignments. For example, a local team loses to an Angolan team, Savimbi Fast XI the coach will say ‘We lost but we learnt something from this game’. I think in coaching courses they are taught PR through a module named something like Learnt Something 101. The question is when is this education going to be implemented to the benefit of the team because five years later the same coach will come up with the same ‘learnt something’ refrain.
During this past week we also heard Elon Musk had bought Twitter for $44 million. This is hard to understand for us mere mortals with bank balances oscillating between two and three digits. We are still baffled at how something that could be downloaded for free was bought for such a huge amount of money. If he had sought advice from some of us we would have saved him a stash of dough. But billionaires have not been taught to listen to advice from people deep in the ghettos of Brokeland. They just don’t work that way. They’d rather blow some billions before listening to your sorry financial insight.
I am, however, not discouraged though and am currently on a mission to get Musk’s contact numbers. My patience right now is on vulture mode so I will bid my time until I get the number. I just want to take him through a little crash course on how to download stuff like Twitter from the internet for free. I am not even expecting any sort of tip. This is merely community service!
From my experience
once you hear anybody say ‘we learnt something’ after any type of event know that objectives and goals were not
met