A bad week for Carl Niehaus

A good week for Tania Campbell

We may be writing otherwise this time next week, given the daily blowouts that characterise Gauteng’s municipal coalitions, but for now, Tania Campbell has stormed back into the Ekurhuleni mayoral office with a 55% endorsement. She won’t have much rearranging to do considering she was forced out of the job less than two weeks ago, but she’ll have her work cut out to steady the council, not to mention residents’ frayed nerves. The idealists among us hope that her re-election signifies a return to that rarest of municipal attributes — actual service delivery. The cynics wonder what the power-hungry politicians are really cooking up here.

A bad week for Carl Niehaus

When is a dog not a dog? When it is a literary allusion, according to Carl Niehaus, a man of many illusions, as he tried to squirm his way out of his call to physically assault a woman in gender-violence awareness week. So far this make-believe Pep “soldier” has refused to retract his threat against journalist Karyn Maughan, but he has until Monday, and the smart money is on this Sad Sack running up the white flag before then. Niehaus was specific: Maughan was a dog who needed to be kicked. It was not, as he claimed afterwards, a centuries-old English adage.