Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The Honeysucker is one of the world’s great euphemisms.

That sweet sounding device is actually the machine that sucks the sewage out of the conservancy tanks of homes in some small towns around the Cape.

You don’t want to be downwind of this beast when it starts pumping the stinking waste into its belly. Its operators are the modern mechanised version of the bucket-men who used to carry the excrement on their shoulders (and sadly still do in a few parts of the province).

To my eyes and nostrils this is a deeply unpleasant task and yet the Honeysucker guys in overtime action in Stanford on Sunday were full of good humour and solid competence.

I thought little of that until the city council garbage truck came backing down my Rondebosch road in the cold and dark hours of yesterday morning. Bang on schedule, as they have been every week for 10 years, including holidays such as Boxing Day, the refuse team cleared the street’s bins containing the preposterous amounts of rubbish generated in prosperous suburbs with levels of efficiency, energy and enthusiasm that I have rarely seen in any office context.

It was an impressive operation which was carried out with what I was about to describe as military precision until I realised that such a swift and clinical execution of a task is now completely beyond any part of the SANDF who would anyway have ordered a R3 billion submarine to do the job.

Along with the fresh memory of the Honeysucker heroes, the performance of the refuse collectors gave me a strange surge in optimism.

It’s been a grim couple of years in which the already tenuous thread of trust in the government and public services at every level has frayed very thin.

Few people now approach any contact with officialdom in any form with a belief that the process will be logical, quick and beneficial because, rightly or wrongly, there’s a dangerous prevailing assumption that politics, dishonesty, disinterest or incompetence (if not all four) will be encountered.

Horror stories abound about passports, pensions, planning approvals, speeding tickets, BEE fronting on tenders and learner’s licences to the point where it now seems almost macabre that Thabo Mbeki was initially characterised as Mr Delivery – the man who was going to shift the focus from theory and policy to actually getting things done.

Yet here are our refuse collectors, the frontline troops of the public service with, in many people’s terms, the worst jobs in the world, functioning superbly. I am aware of one international study that shows garbagemen to be the happiest workers of all but there was no explanation as to why. My best guess is that its far better to collect rubbish than to listen to it which is what most employees have to do all day.

I have dabbled with the thought of setting myself up as a management guru to spread the lessons of the disposal men to the cabinet, city council and the boardrooms. I would call the programme “A Load of Old Rubbish” which would be different from every other magical management formula only because of its honesty!

The potential is enormous.

All politicians and CEOs would be compelled to spend time with the Honeysucker so they could learn what their words really smell like.

As an incentive scheme for more moderate executive pay packages, the director with the highest number of options gets to do the clean out of the truck’s waste tank.

I would send the marketing team of any financial services company out to collect all the junk mail that has been sent in their name so they would finally realise how many of those wasteful envelopes are unopened when they hit the bin.

Supermarket bosses would also be confronted with just how much completely unnecessary polystyrene and plastic packaging they are generating.

As for the management of Eskom, they would be forced to try asking for their annual bonuses door-to-door, as the garbagemen do with their Christmas boxes, rather than just determining themselves that they deserve it.

The education department bosses would learn about the true meaning of something being Outcomes Based – the bins are either emptied or they are not.

In a broader context we could all benefit from a tour of duty with these guys if only to learn about how staggeringly wasteful we are.