OC 154 South African Podcast OC 154 South African Podcast

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
similarities between the little community and the country at large. So I would urge you to listen till the end because that is where cash value of all the stories lie.

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 explore a somewhat esoteric aspect of our lives. H and I had experience with the psychedelics in a form of psilocybin mushrooms. The goal, for me at least, was to continue the search for and to investigate the nature of consciousness. I have been a meditator for almost 4 years now, and most of my insights in this area of my life were greatly influenced by the American philosopher and Neuroscientist, Sam Harris. I use his meditation app to start my day every morning, and I have consumed tens, if not hundreds of hours of the content on his meditation app on topics ranging from moral philosophy, to living a good life all the way to Buddhist teachings and Eastern Philosophy in general. He is one public intellectual who has had the most influence in my life in the recent years, especially after I officially became an atheist. He introduced me to what spiritually means and looks like outside of organised religion, what has come to be known as secular spirituality.
On the other hand, H’s curiosity was sparked by his encounter with Will Smith’s ayahuasca story in his auto-biography as well as Bill Burr’s magic mushroom experience that he shared in his latest Netflix special, and other people who had claimed to have had a spiritual experience from ingesting these compounds.
We spend the greater part of the first half of this episode, sharing our subjective experiences, or trips as they are colloquially referred to. We had a whole build up to our respective experiences, and naturally, we did a lot of research too. Was the experience as pyrotechnic as we had anticipated? Have you ever wondered what sex is like while on a psychedelic trip?

There is some ground-breaking research at the moment taking place in the states on these substances, decades after they were banned even for purposes of scientific research. The research so far is proving the tremendous psychological benefits that these substances can have, and the health of many addicts and mental patients they have managed to restore, even on patients with mental pathologies that had proven to be resistant to pharmaceutical drugs and therapy.

Later in the podcast, GT, whose life is self-admittedly a mess of a different kind, finally joins us after a weekend of binge drinking, and he tries his best to convince us that he is sober. We then proceed to do our favourite thing; we judge him relentlessly. He had actually convinced me to take out that part of the podcast because he felt like he was not his best self, but I convinced him otherwise. You can listen and be the judge.
Okay, maybe it’s about time we did a bit of psychoanalysing here, are we maybe jealous that GT is having too much of a good time for our liking down in the mother city? I mean the guy is living the life of a rock star down there, in this episode, we even find out that he may or may not be Mamokgethi Phakeng’s Ben 10, and she is essentially the one funding this unruly lifestyle of his.
On the other news, at our Alma Matta, Wits university, a lecturer by the name of Jeremia Lelosa is embroiled in a scandal for allegedly scamming a couple of people, including his colleagues there at Wits and one of GT’s friends. GT gives us all the scoop in this controversy, Wits has since suspended the lecturer pending investigations. We also have a voice note from the lecturer himself, that he had sent to this friend of GT, so, you cannot afford to miss that part of this episode.

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.

Welcome to episode 7 of the OC 154 Podcast.

As has become the norm now, we start off the episode by looking back at our respective weekends. We record on Sunday evenings, so its always nice to have a quick catch up of the weekend behind us.

On the Friday prior to the recording of this episode, Sifiso Nene had a comedy show, Baby Mama Drama 2, in Bloemfontein, which is where I am currently based. And of course I attended the show. So I start off by giving the gents my experience of Sifiso’s comedy and how polished and well crafted his show is, even with the bits he performs in Zulu. Which leads to me to having a banter about the poor quality of material and the laziness of vernacular comedians like bo Mashabela. You can tell here that this is something I have been waiting to share my thoughts on, it’s really bothering me.
Well, I also had my very own baby drama on the evening of the show, which I also talk about.
While we are still talking about comedy, we used this opportunity to give our views on the Khanyi Mbau roast that had aired during the week of recording this episode.

Anyways, another thing that was happening live while we were recording is the South African Music Awards at Sun City, apparently, lol. I say apparently with a tongue in chick because no one even knew that the awards would be and had taken place during that weekend. The quality of those awards is absolutely appalling, and we certainly do not mince our words here to describe how horrible the quality of the whole production of the award show has become, and how little relevance they have left. Not even the somewhat ironic technical problems we started having while complaining about the poor quality of the SAMAs could stop us.

The incompetencies in many spheres of our country then opens up a discussion about the controversial Dr Phophi Ramathuba’s video that was making the rounds. Where she is seen addressing a patient at one of the hospitals in Limpopo that are under her administration. The patient is of a Zimbabwean nationality, and this of course leads to a very contentious discussion about the illegal immigrants in the country, and the strain they put on our health system, or not. This is one of those classic OC 154 type of conversations. Difference of opinions and point of views and a good debate. More than anything, I believe the discussion is a thought provoking one that is bound to get you re-assessing your current position on the topic, in one way or another. To make sure that we also leave no stones unturned, I also play the devil’s advocate on the discussion here and there to ensure that even the views that are not held by any of the 3 of us, are well presented on the discussion. The number one rule about playing the devil’s advocate is to ensure not to straw man the arguments that you yourself do not hold as your own, I remain conscious of this throughout the discussion and I would like to think I did a good job at that.

And of course, you cannot talk about the politics of illegal immigrants in the country, especially those from fellow African countries, and not discuss the EFF. Here, we get to hear H, who is arguably the most loyal EFF supporter I know personally, vehemently lambast their naïve position on the question of illegal immigrants and how they reacted to the Dr Phophi’s video. I have to say, I was quite surprised by H’s stands on this particular one.
After this, we then proceed to discuss South African famous slay queens, Mihlali in particular. Listen, I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation, and I have no doubt that you will too, in fact, I can guarantee you that you, will.

This conversation beautifully oscillates between the trivial and the very important, between the serious and the very silly and ridiculous. It is the sort of conversation you would probably be listening to if you were a fly on the wall in the corridors of Mens Res. The discussion addresses everything from the crass display

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.