A bad week for Patricia de Lille

A good week for Tete Dijana

Three months ago, Tete Dijana was going through a personal crisis and needed to consult a psychologist. He also decided to take unpaid leave from his job as a security guard in Mahikeng and focus on running the Comrades Marathon, a race in which he’d finished 50th when it was last run in 2019. He thought he could do better when he lined up in the 2022 event on Sunday for the down run from Pietermaritzburg to Durban. Just over five hours later, he was first across the finish, earning R260,000 for winning plus another R100,000 as the first South African to finish the race. He returned to work this week.

A bad week for Patricia de Lille

Never go shopping with Patricia de Lille; she’s too expensive. The minister of public works is about to present taxpayers with a bill of R2bn for the repair of the houses of parliament — damage for which her department was responsible after failing to maintain fire alarms. She now expects her pie-in-the-sky figure for fixing a burnt-out building to be accepted, just as she thought R37m was a bargain for a border fence that didn’t work. This is the kind of thumb-suck accounting that almost gave us a R22m flagpole. Does the government not know when to stop putting noughts to its sums?