Welcome to episode 11 of the OC 154 Podcast.

This is one episode that is jam packed with stories, stories for days I tell you, of our time during varsity days, at Wits, which is where the three of us first met.

A bit of background on what the CC, or Central Committee we keep referring to is…basically an informal think tank of some sort at Mens Res that we had. From what I can recall, the genesis of this so-called CC was around our second year into third year at Mens Res. There was a pool table in there where gents would gather during their free time to play pool in the common room. Now and again, an argument would erupt about any range of topics, but mostly politics, both on a national level and Wits. Over time there started being rules around how these arguments take place, some house rules if you like. I just remember us nit even playing pool anymore in that room, where the primary reason for going there was to hang out and argue with gents. My memory might be failing me here, but I hope I got the crux of it right.

I am recording this after a weekend where I attended my fiancé graduation at the University of the Free State. And she, like many of her fellow graduates, have very little experience of a university campus life because a great majority of their degrees were completed remotely, while the world was under COVID lockdowns. So if you are a first year at a tertiary institution this year, your seniors on campus this year who doing their post-graduate might not be the best example of the sort of mindset that a tertiary student should have, and to no fault of their own. So I highly recommend this episode as we make a deep dive into discussing the hidden curriculum that comes with sharing a physical campus with different people from all walks of life, and who are equally or smarter than you, who are from different financial backgrounds from you, and so forth. In fact, this particular episode was inspired by an interview we had watched of one of our former fellow raiders at Mens Res, Phesheya, that he did with Penuel. The guy comes from a very affluent family and he stayed with the rest of us, peasants at Mens res. And I was taken aback to hear some of the challenges he spoke about that came with being a cheese boy. It turns out, that the identity crisis that many of us suffer in our early adulthood, is orthogonal to how well off the family you come from is.

We explore many other related topics such as, the quality, or lack thereof, of the basic education in South Africa, university administrative structures, the value of Res life versus off campus living, the importance of being street smart in university, financial and academic exclusion, navigating friendships with friends that did not get to go to university, and other topics.

We start off the episode by exploring the complexities and the dynamics between inter-socio class friendships, and the moreki complex amongst friends, sparked by a story about myself and a friend of mine who could not make it to varsity but ended up with "I blew it" money after the passing of his father.

As we approach the end of our recording, we begin to catch out on all the stories that were narrated throughout our recording, we get into the what I can call the punchline of our conversation, we extract lessons the country can learn from this micro-community that we were part of at Mens res, given the striking

So much has happened in this country since the recording of this episode, and here is some of the big events I would like to reflect on before we get into today’s episode.

last week, , we woke up to the tragic news of AKA being shot outside a club in Durban. But at the same time, during the mourning process and the shock that many people are rightfully displaying, some other weird things also start happening.

You see people on twitter, who were not that close to AKA, who are just remote fans like myself, become a little bit hysterical, almost to a point of attention seeking.

I saw someone joke that, Rasta is busy preparing his paint as we speak, and I mean that is a fairly innocuous joke, it is not insensitive in any way because it is not making fun of AKA’s death itself or making fun of the fact that he is dead, so when I went into the comments, most people just chuckled along and liked the joke, because it is a South African inside joke that when someone passes away, Rasta will soon paint a remotely resembling portrait of them, which he did eventually by the way, and this time around it wasn’t bad honestly. But then some people started attacking this poor guy for this joke, the “its too soon brigade”. And if we are being honest, how angry are they really about this joke, or do they just want to demonstrate how good and compassionate people they are, who care so much about AKA’s death that they are willing to attack another guy who probably didn’t know AKA in real life just like them, for making a harmless joke in the mist of the news about his death. I cannot help but think that this virtue signalling behaviour is the product of the woke culture that is currently dominating social media these days, where people think the more outrage they express, the more of good hearts we will think they have.

Don’t even get me started with Panyaza Lesufi and his attempts to get AKA a state funeral. Put aside the argument about whether or not AKA deserves a state funeral, but do we really think an attention seeking politician like Panyaza Lesufi was trying to do this out of the goodness of his heart? Or it was just an opportunity for his to grand stand and pave his way to the 2024 elections, like we have seen him do with many issues that he knows are close to people’s hearts. This guy is really starting to become annoying. It was all good when he was doing it during his MEC of Education days, but now it is getting too much bro. We don’t have to see you handing out sanitary pads to school girls, you can do it privately, in fact, something like that should be done privately. For those who have not seen that picture, you don’t want to its too cringe.

The second thing that started happening that brought with it some bizzare things as well, is when people want to try and piece together what happened and what was the motive behind. And unfortunately, knowing the incompetence of Bheki Cele and his people, we may never know, we may have to wait another 10 years like we saw with the Senzo Meyiwa case.

Everyone is doing their own research these days; we don’t need the so-called experts anymore.

But guys, we cannot build a justice system on twitter threads and Youtube channels. As cute as alternative media, alternative medicine, alternative this and that may be, we cannot rely on Adv Barry Roux twitter account to resolve the crime for us in this country, we need the police force that work, we need impartial and competent courts, we need intelligence, we need experts.

In this episode, we discuss some of the topics that have become the staple of this podcast, now.

We investigate how Africans can organise their societies using their value systems to reimagine different aspects of their existence.

This is a discussion very close to H's heart as you would have heard in the previous recordings. But personally, I find the arguments to be bordering on polylogisms, for the most part, which is essentially an idea that different racial and cultural groups and societies reason in fundamentally different ways or put differently, that different groups of people have different logic.

We can always expand on this discussion in the future recordings but for now, you can make up your mind on the debate we had with H on this topic in this episode.

And then something very interesting happened in South Africa two weeks or so after the recording of this episode, the Dischem scandal. For those who are not familiar with this controversy, I will give you a quick synopsis.

An internal staff communication leaked on social media on which the powers that be at Dischem declared a moratorium on the employment and promotion of white people in the company because they felt that they were not achieving their BEE targets in terms of the ratio of black people and the whites within the organisation quick enough.

This obviously sparked great contention, the nature of which would be difficult to summarise here.

But some of the discussions were around the diversity in the workplace, and how corporate South Africa has not transformed over time.

In this episode, GT introduced us to a study that was done by Deloitte which found that lack of diversity is one of the top reasons professionals leave their employment. We unpack this topic and I share with you my experience working at a black firm in Johannesburg, while on the other hand, H is deeply troubled by the adoption of the American concepts such as diversity to describe challenges that we face as a country that is a majority black country.

As the Dischem scandal unfolded, especially on social media, some white people announced and threatened to boycott and sell their shares at Dischem, and of course, black twitter being black twitter, a smalernyana campaign erupted in which every black person was encouraged to purchase these shares as the share price dropped obviously from this scandal and as some people disposed of their shares. And ladies and gentlemen, as I am speaking to you today, Dischem is now a black majority owned business! Of course I am kidding, there is no such.

But imagine it was, would that change anything about Dischem as we know it today? Will it really matter? And that is where the discussions on our podcast takes this question a step further.

To what end do we want this so-called diversity and inclusion so badly if a Dischem is going to just be a dischem as we know it today whether it is under black or white ownership and senior management.

Hence H believes that the barometer should be set a bit higher for a business to call itself a black business. Being a black business cannot be just a matter of pigmentation of those in governance and ownership of the business, it should be way more than that. To find out what H means here, stick around for the rest of the episode. Do you agree with his sentiments? Well, I don’t entirely agree with him as you will be able to tell, but this is much further in the episode.

At the beginning, as has become tradition by now, we start off the episode by discussing our respective weekends. And for the first time ever in months, GT spent the weekend doing some of his academic work for the PHD that he is doing, for a change, well done to him.

This conversation quickly takes a different turn, and it becomes about Prof Mamokgethi Phakeng, the VC down there at UCT, where GT happens to be doing his PHD. These and other topics.

In this episode, we tackle and unpack the Senzo Meyiwa murder trial that is currently ongoing.

My two co-hosts, H and GT are both law graduates and we had also invited our 4th friend who is also a law graduate and has been paying close attention to this case, to come join us in trying to make sense of this messy trial.

This is by no means an attempt to reveal some hidden mysteries of this case or to resolve it, but we simply try to make sense of the information that is already in the public domain.

Furthermore, this podcast should be treated separately from my and my co-hosts’ professional careers, as it is simply a casual conversation amongst ourselves as ordinary members of the public.

Even though my co-hosts’ insights are incredibly useful and interesting in making sense of this case, they should never be treated as legal or professional opinion or advice under any circumstances.

Senzo Meyiwa trial, which we kick start by looking back at the origins of this case, and the unfolding of events as they took place over the years, before we saw the resumption of this case again now in 2022. I thought this might be a useful way to remind ourselves of a broader context of where we find ourselves today in this case, and how the public conversation surrounding this case has evolved over time.

Many might argue, including myself, that the change in the tide of this case in the court of public opinion is around the time when the NPA erroneously leaked the details around the controversial second docket in 2019, and this is also exactly a point where our conversation also takes a different turn.

You will notice a thread throughout this episode of me asking some really basic questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask about how the different cogs within our justice system work and interface with one another, I ask for definitions of some of the jargon the lawyers like to use and hide behind so that they can charge crazy fees, that you will hear my co-host casually use as well. So I did the heavy lifting for you here, and it was not easy, as you will hear GT’s uncontrollable laughter at some of my seemingly imbecilic questions.

Which brings me to a second reason I wanted us to have this conversation. The law and the justice system affects us all, yet, an average South African like myself knows so little about it, and on the other hand, the concepts used by the lawyers and the legal texts to describe some of the basic principles are so lofty and very intimidating to a pedestrian like myself. So I thought this Senzo Meyiwa trial would be a good case study to learn a few of some of these concepts in a criminal case like this one and in a digestible fashion and with immediate real life application and examples from an actual trial.

Lastly, we had a discussion about Advocate Teffo, which took a very interesting turn that I could have never predicted. Our guest co-host revealed that the man did not complete his pupilage, which is some kind of formalized training for advocates. This revelation opens up a debate which highlights the nature and the route of acquiring the status of prestige within the advocacy field, which is one way of looking at that conversation, another way to look at it, especially if you are studying towards a law career, is that the discussion provides some career guidance on what you need to look out for if you want to practice as an advocate, especially given the new regulation that has come into effect recently that GT educated us about.

We also discuss the usual suspects in this case, Kelly Khumalo, Longwe and Chiko Thwala, Maggie Phiri, and many other characters and subtopics.

So in this episode, I am going to neatly package predictions we made about Kaya Fm breakfast show, which Sol is now part of, that we made during the main episode and assess the extend to which they materialized.

So the first discussion point I would like to start off with, which is not a prediction per se.

When the news broke that Dineo would be co-hosting the breakfast show with Sol, the impression I got was that he would be the co-host who will play an equal role in anchoring the show, as opposed to a mere traffic guy.

1stJuly, 6 am, we all got up extra early to listen to the much anticipated 959 Breakfast show, the show trending on social media before the end of the first hour of the show.

So over the years of being an avid listener of radio, I noticed something about how the shows that are personality driven tend to be structured. They sort of center the features of the show around the personalities who are the face of that show. This is not always the case, but in instances where they actually do do it, you can learn a lot about the kind of things the hosts are into, and if done well, you can get best show out of your hosts, because they would get a chance to express their interests through these features which is always a win for the listener.

They have the politics on Mondays, during which they bring a polical analytics, last week was Eusebius, but I am not sure if he is the permanent host of that feature or they will be doing different analysts over time, but that is neither here nor there for the point I am trying to get to here. It is not clear to who this feature is meant for between Sol and Dineo, but I personally think it is just one of those features to bring about some gravity to the show. If that was the producers thinking, it would make total sense, the two are celebrity type entertainers, and if left to be, they would certainly spend the entire week talking silly celebrity things and not even touching on some big important issues in the country, so you need a feature to sort of force that discussion, even if it is just once a week on a Monday.

Welcome to episode 5 of the OC 154 Podcast. Right off the bat, I would like to say, this was one of the most enjoyable episodes to record for me, maybe it is because of the kind of topics we got to explore in the episode, or maybe I had one too many rounds of vodka, who knows, but I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did.

GT and I start off the episode on a bit of a light note, as we share personal stories from our weekends. My suspicion was finally confirmed that the main reason GT went to stay in Cape Town was not to do his PHD, but to get laid, primarily, the PHD is just an excuse.  So he shares the story of a failed attempt from the weekend of the recording of the episode, which H and I were convinced that it was a missed opportunity for a 3 sum.

H then also chirps in with a story about his weekend, which was far less promiscuous, and as always, I of course used that opportunity to get some marriage advise from him, despite the fact that the story had absolutely nothing to do with marriage or relationships.

After this little chatter, we jump straight into our main topic for the week.

Welcome to the supplementary episode to episode 4 that we published two weeks ago. The goal of these episodes is not fixed at this point, it is my little experiment to see what value can I extract from our main episode and what other additional content that can we package for you that makes the podcast more than just audio entertainment.

For this particular episode, as promised from the main episode, my goal is to have a look at some of the claims that the three of us made during our main episode, and to unpack them and link them to some underlying research or data. When we are recording, we try by all means to keep the conversation as natural as possible and unscripted, and as an unavoidable consequences of this, we are bout to utter some things that we are not a 100% sure of, or refer to events that we don’t exactly remember the details of, or make claims in passing that are worth exploring a little bit further. So in this episode, we are going to slow things down a bit and do some fact checking and deconstructing some arguments, providing some other necessary contexts, and other means of just enriching the original conversation we had.

I am going to take it for granted that you have already listened to the original episode, so I wont be reiterating anything verbatim or in great details, so if you have not listened to the main episode.