SOEs must go – like my beard

‘You need a haircut,” the lovely Snapdragon told me on Wednesday. “Long hair makes you look old.”

“But he must leave his grey beard,” said the four-year-old Egg.

“Does it make me look handsome?” I asked, touched by my youngest’s obvious pride in her father’s manly appearance.

“No,” she replied. “You’re still butt-ugly, but it makes you look like Santa and I love Santa.”

So, yesterday morning I took my dented ego and drove to my Algerian barber.

As always, he was positive and chatty.

“In 1997, when I came here, I could hardly speak English. I bought The Citizen – it only cost R1.10 those days – and underlined all the words I recognised.

“I was surprised to see how many of the words are the same as in French. National, constitutional, justice, racism… It dawned on me that the pronunciation may be unfamiliar, but that I already have a reasonable English vocabulary.

“That realisation helped me not only to learn English, but see that there is little space for our narcissism and own petty ideas about individualism,” he told me.

While I’m typing, I don’t know how my beardless and hopefully youthful appearance will be received by the women in my life. But I know I’m bound to remain Santa for a few years to come.

Which brings us to the state broadcaster, who started a brutal process of retrenchments. Many of its employees will celebrate Christmas without the privilege of employment.

But it’s time that the people decide how much longer we can afford the luxury of SOEs in their present guise.

The SABC, Eskom, Transnet, the old SAA (and, I have an unpleasant hunch, the new SAA, too) have all become bottomless pits into which billions of taxpayer rands disappear annually.

It’s time to get rid of most of them. And the few remaining ones will need a serious makeover – without consideration of political individualism or the narcissism of politically motivated individuals. (Do you remember Hlaudi?)

Or else we will continue to be reluctant Santas who take money from vital services such as healthcare, education and crime prevention to subsidise what is little more than vanity institutions.