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This piece first appeared in The Herald on 17 February 2026

The unending panoramic landscape along the N9 through that part of the Karroo between Middleburg and what is soon to be Robert Sobukwe Town, is without any doubt the most spectacular to be found anywhere in the world. The only thing that could possibly have made this route more breathtaking would have been for there to a dramatic thunderstorm playing itself out, like the one that I was driving through on my way back from Johannesburg this Tuesday. You see my son and I had driven my daughter up to start her last year at Wits where we settled her in to her new flat with furniture we had hauled up from the farm on the back of my old Hilux.

On the miles and miles of open road between Johannesburg and Gqeberha my mind flitted between what a shit ton of money it costs to raise kids and what a beautiful privilege it is for me to have been so lucky as to earn a living in this impossible economy and ensure that each of my three beautiful children are able to make the most of their brilliant young minds.

As I drive, my thoughts also drift to the good progress we have made as a country in seeing to it that capable matriculants are no longer denied the ability to study at a tertiary institution just because their mama and papa are broke, debilitated or absent. NSFAS, I am sure, is not perfect but it does bring us a little bit closer to the kind of country I would prefer to live in.

I also know that the kind of South Africa that many of the protesting students currently being shot down by balaclava wearing private militia in Summerstrand would like to live in may not be achievable in my lifetime. Many of their demands seek to undermine the integrity of the university system. We must however recognise that some of their grievances can actually be addressed and should be attended to as a matter of utmost urgency.

To be honest, I don’t know much at all about university admission criteria or the “NMU Meal Management System” so I will remain silent on those matters.  I do know quite a bit though about student accommodation. And it is regarding the matter of the critical shortage of  student accommodation, that we need to point a finger squarely at the NMBM Mayor Babalwa Lobishe. Why? You may ask. This is a university matter and nothing to do with the metro. Well, this is where you are getting it wrong and this is where those that must be held accountable hide behind their ignorance of technical and planning matters to create confusion. But don’t worry, I am here to clear things up for everybody.

You see, while there is a lot of noise around the subject, the undeniable truth is that there is a drastic undersupply of adequate student accommodation in the metro. My clever friend Aurick (one of the few MBA’s I know that are not too boring to have coffee with) explains to me that the shortage of student beds in the NMB metro runs into the thousands! That’s not Okay! What is often missed though is  that a significant proportion of student housing is provided by the  private sector on land owned by the private sector. This is of course where the NMBM comes in, because it is the metro that decides (through its land use policies) where student residences can be built and where they cannot be built. You may not believe this, but the NMBM have decided that almost all of the all of the private land within walking distance of the north and south campus of the NMU may not be developed as student residences. I kid you not!  Sure, the NMBM may point to their student accommodation policy which permits the owner of any ordinary home to apply for the “right” to accommodate students. But even where I, in my professional capacity, have helped these private land owners jump through all the mindless and impossible hoops to get such a “special consent”, the property is still only permitted to accommodate 12 students. 12 Students! That’s a joke. In Braamfontein (withing walking distance of Wits), a property big enough to fit only one rich person’s house in Summerstrand, will easily accommodate 200 students.

Now I know that running a metro is not easy and I know that making the kind of policy decisions to remove the obstacles standing in the way of the provision of student accommodation is not easy. We also  however know that it can be done and that other municipalities have already shown us how to do it. So, to Mayor Lobishe, if I am telling you something you did not know, you need to immediately (and very publicly) fire your advisors and replace them with people literate in these matters. If however, you already know and understand that NMBM policy is the largest single obstacle standing in the way of private investors solving our student housing crisis and have done nothing about it, I am sure the citizens of NMB Metro would like to know why you feel protesting students should not be burning tyres in front of City Hall instead of along University Way.

Please Mayor Lobishe, take the public into your confidence. We are all in this together!

This piece first appeared in The Herald on 28 June 2024

I braaied boerewors on the open fire again last night. It’s just not the same when fried in the pan. And besides, we had ran out of stove gas and I was lazy to drive to the shop to get a refill from Abu. But as my grown son and I sat outside in the crisp night air, our conversation shifted from the longstanding debate on the relative merits of our fantastic local boerewors makers. (I was leaning more toward my Lorraine guy, while my son was arguing quite strongly in favour of the more balanced clove and coriander flavours from our favourite butcher shops in  North End and Perridgevale)

The discussion began to focus more on the clear night sky as we imagined that one of those littles “stars” was the Boeing Starliner stuck in space as it struggles to get back home from a short visit to the International Space Station. You see, the Boeing astronauts have been stuck up there for a few days now because of some complicated technical problem to do with helium, I think. To be honest I don’t really know, but Elon Musk does. Mr Musk explains that the actual problem is that Boeing is run by an admin type, by the name of David Calhoun. Musk’s view is that “the CEO of an aircraft company should know how to design aircraft, not spreadsheets.” Of course Musk is shooting from the hip and taking a dig at a business rival, but beneath his one line comment on “X” lies perhaps a deeper, more concerning truth that seems to trouble large parts of our world right now. Let me explain.

My observation is that it is no exception at all that an aerospace company like Boeing is run by a B.Com graduate. In fact, it has rather become the norm that institutions have come to be managed by those who have the training and demeanour to navigate the ever more complicated compliance and procedural hurdles that stand every day in the way of our efforts to continue with productive work. I can tell you than in running my own little business, I find that every day there is new pressure to spend even less time in the work that I need to do to get beautiful buildings built. Every day I am challenged to spend my time being  sure that I have explained what I have done in such a way that South African Revenue Service can understand. Every day I am compelled to put effort into ensuring that CIPC is happy, that the UIF is happy, that supply chain is happy, that the town planners are happy that the health and safety officials are happy. I do all of the is while rushing around in the hope that I don’t make the traffic department unhappy or flout the provisions of FICA, RICA and POPIA .

Now while the younger version of me, may have tended toward the promotion of the goal of stateless anarchy as a remedy to these evils, the wiser, more mellow version of me has come to see that it is perhaps more practical that we focus on trying where we can to help our parliamentary legislators adopt what I call “design thinking” in the good work that they do. This rather than the “reactive thinking” that they currently display.

Because, right now, when legislators see the poor being exploited by a dodgy lender, they react by writing legislation that makes it a mission for all of us to get credit.  When legislators see a few cases of  diarrhoea they react by making it illegal for small farmers to sell raw milk. When legislators see criminals using cell phones or bank accounts they react by writing legislation to compel all of us submit piles of mindless paper work before we can make a phone call or draw money from the ATM.

Legislation really does have a massive and ever present impact on how we spend the hours of each day.  Whether we feel the drain on our time and energy coming from our bank or our ISP or the traffic department, all of these have as the source of their authority a piece of legislation that comes out of Parliament.

So, it is therefore now in the spirit of generosity that I make an offer to  all the newly sworn in parliamentarians. Please come to my office as part of your induction for a day long “design thinking” training programme. There I will sit you down with paper and kokis and get you to re-design a little house. In this exercise I will help you see that you cant make the kitchen bigger without making the lounge smaller. It will get you to know that while stairs take up space in the hall way, removing them makes it difficult to get to the first floor. The exercise will help you feel in your bones that everything is connected, like an ecosystem, and that each piece of legislation you write in this seventh parliament, could have consequences that you had not at first anticipated.

Perhaps through the generosity of my free training programme our new parliamentarians may come to see that the more they continue to add rules, the more it becomes possible for only the most exceptional of capable geniuses like Elon Musk to remain creative in spite of them.

Who would want that?