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Is Mark Barnes turning the Post Office around?
Mark Barnes has a lot of good ideas to turn the SA Post Office around and enable it to compete in the Internet world — among them a better package-delivery service, banking and social grant distribution. But getting government backing for every move he makes may prove to be a tougher challenge than anything competitors can throw at him. The story of how former Standard Bank executive Mark Barnes scored perhaps the worst job in the country sounds apocryphal, but isn’t. Barnes had already seen the news that the Post Office planned to shut down a third of its branches and retrench thousands, and believed it didn’t have to be that way. So, soon afterwards, he fired off an e-mail to deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, titled "Amazon buys 30% of SA Post Office in joint venture with SA government". An incredulous Ramaphosa (who was in Indonesia at the time) wote back, asking what Barnes had meant. Well, that story isn’t entirely true, Barnes replied, but just imagine if it was? His point, h...
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