LUKANYO MNYANDA: Looking back while moving forward — all the mentors and mates

It’s hard to know if they were teasing me or really thought I had anything profound to say when a few friends and colleagues insisted I had to mark the end of my editorship of Business Day with a farewell column.

I’m not going to be that departing correspondent who knows it all and can therefore dish out advice and predictions on SA’s future. This means I’m left to do something that comes even less naturally — talking about myself.

A good start may possibly be my first proper morning after arriving in the UK to start a new role at the Financial Times, when I woke up to the news of the death of Mike Schüssler, an economist who was an ever present to journalists of my generation. 

In the many tributes already written, what flowed through them all was his great support for journalism.

The timing of his passing made me reflect on my own journey and the people who helped to shape it. Dawie Roodt reflected on how Schüssler respected people, not their titles or status.

Another formative figure in my journey was Greta Steyn, who was Business Day’s economics editor. One day she told me she had this great idea to turn me into an economics reporter. And she wasn’t deterred when I confessed to not knowing what producer inflation was.

I got this flashback when one of my colleagues mentioned that I’d  hired her despite her talking about Game’s non-existent share price. And what a great hire she has been.

Schüssler, then an economist at Transnet, was one of the people Steyn shipped me off to for my education. There truly was never such a thing as a “stupid question” for him and I never once felt patronised. Rudolf Gouws was another I would often lean on. More than once he would take an afternoon to explain concepts over lunch at the canteen at RMB, where he was chief economist. 

When I reconnected with Schüssler after my return to SA, it never felt like more than a decade had passed or that my own status was now more elevated.

It also doesn’t feel that long ago that my most immediate, and rather more eloquent, predecessor Tim Cohen was writing his own farewell letter. He mentioned being one of the longest-serving employees of Business Day. It  reminded me of an elderly man I met in Edinburgh about a decade earlier. It was a joke I was sure he had told many times about his marriages. He had been married for however many decades, he said, before adding, “on and off”.

Having walked into the diamond building in Diagonal Street as a nearly 23-year-old and now leaving just a few months before entering my sixth decade, I think I may well be in a position to challenge Cohen to this status. I had never known any other place of work, and Business Day, and the brilliant people I encountered, did the most to shape what I would become, both personally and professionally.

The only other office I’d been inside was the then Eastern Province Herald, my home newspaper. I could write another column about how I scrambled together a few rand for a taxi and somehow bullied Robert Ball, who was then managing editor, into allowing me to work there during my holiday from Rhodes, though he told me that taking first years was not the norm.

Jim Jones gave me my first day at Business Day. I still remember being in awe of the people I found there. Nomavenda Mathiane used to tease me about my badly ironed shirts. John Dludlu is another person who hasn’t changed in all these years and still has that distinctive laugh of his. Then there was Mduduzi ka Harvey, lost to journalism and the world too soon. When graduation day came and I still didn’t own a suit, he lent me his. 

Peter Bruce would be the second editor to hire me at Business Day. He remains a valued mentor, as does Hilary Joffe. On and off, she might well be the longest-serving of us all and has enriched the paper each time.

I did also meet people closer to my own age, and one of them was Pule Molebeledi, who quickly rose up the ranks to be political editor, and with whom I share one of the strangest events of my career. One day we were at an ANC conference in Stellenbosch, and someone invites us to “a party” in Cape Town. A few hours later, we were at Brett Kebble’s mansion in Bishopscourt. He’s another person who’s not affected by titles, and continues to be a loyal friend, despite his now definitely elevated position as my boss for one more day.

Since my early days, what was then Times Media has gone through various owners and name changes, the latest being the transaction late in 2019 that gave birth to Arena Holdings, chaired by Tshepo Mahloele. I’m often asked if he has ever sought to influence the editorial direction of the newspaper. When I give a firm no, the follow-up question is what does he want to own a media company for then, since there are surely easier ways to make money?

I must also thank Andrew Gill and Andrew Bonamour for taking a chance with me despite not having any managerial experience to place on my CV. While my emotional bond with Business Day never waned, I didn’t imagine a physical reunion until they came calling.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates to me how the environment for the media has changed more than my first meeting with Cohen. He had just returned to SA after a stint as Business Day’s correspondent in London. It’s hard to imagine now that such budgets existed.

While I will never argue that editing Business Day in 2022 is the easiest thing anyone will do, it’s hard to think of a bigger honour, and it was a privilege to have done it with the most dedicated and hardest-working people I’ve ever met. Of the decisions I had to make, I got the most important one right, and as a result I leave the paper in the capable hands of Tiisetso Motsoeneng, who'll be taking over in an acting capacity, with my absolute confidence.

And thank you to the readers. Writing that column almost every Monday was the most daunting thing I’d ever done and I often felt unworthy. And you made me feel the opposite.