"WE NEED funds to improve service delivery and finish projects that were left incomplete by those who claim to be business people while failing to deliver.

"We also have to address skills shortages and appoint the right people for positions in the municipality. No person without skills will be appointed just because he has political connections or because he is my comrade.

"Right now, I am going to appoint a director of technical services and that person is a qualified engineer. I do not mind paying an extra R200000 a year as long as we have the right skills."

Can you guess who said this?

Wrong, it was not a Godzille-De Lille Connection-aligned municipal manager or an IFP mayor in Nkandla. He could obviously not have been a Cope apparatchik as that so-called party is bleeding itself to death at present.

It was, believe it or not, a die-hard and loyal cadre of Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, one Freddy Greaver, the newly appointed executive mayor of Polokwane.

By lashing out on people "who claim to be businesspeople", as reported in The New Age earlier this week, Greaver has effectively sounded the death knell on tenderpreneurs. He has also put a stop on the jobs-for-comrades practice.

Guluva thinks this humble cadre of the movement has either not heard of affirmative procurement and cadre deployment or he is deliberately working himself out of the cushy job, especially with the local government elections around the corner.

Coins and slogans

Now, for something completely different.

Guluva had always known that there was lots of money to be made in advertising. But what he did not know was that clients could pay as much as R470000 - that is nearly half a million rand - for a slogan or payoff line.

That's the amount the International Marketing Company (IMC), a state-owned entity charged by the government to sell Mzansi's image to the outside world, reportedly paid The Jupiter Drawing Room, one of the country's leading advertising companies, to come up with a fresh, punchy and to-the-point slogan for its campaigns.

The old slogan - Alive With Possibility - was discarded ostensibly because it was used during the tenure of the now-ousted Tobacco Pipe Smoking Intellectual, who is still intensely despised by the new crowd more than two years after he left office.

Unfortunately the new creation - More Than You Imagine - later turned out to be not so new after all and had to be unceremoniously dropped by cabinet.

But, Guluva wants to know, what does it really take to coin a payoff line such as Nokia's "Connecting People" and Standard Bank's "Moving Forward" to warrant such an astronomical price?

Guluva is no rocket scientist, but he is pretty sure he could have done a much better job and charged the clients half the price.

Originality is obviously the key requirement when coining a slogan or payoff line.

But "The Best or Nothing" payoff line for Mercedes Benz used in radio commercials these days cannot be said to be entirely original as it is clearly derived from the old, tried and tested phrase: "All or nothing."

Now that the IMC's slogan was not really what we had imagined, what is the way forward now for The Jupiter Drawing Room? Its creative directors probably have no choice but to go back to the drawing room, er, drawing board.

Email Guluva on: thatha.guluva@gmail.com