Accused of being key

There was a quite extraordinary response to my blog on Friday last week. By response I mean people responding to what they thought I had written. At times my email inbox looked like the responses time line in a News24 article: An unbelievable amount of abuse from the most benign, casting doubt on the marital status of my late parents, to unnatural acts with keyboards, buckets of acid, Satan and the road to hell. The only thing I wasn’t accused of was racism.

The mind boggles at what these people might scream at taxi drivers who aren’t being dragged down the road behind our peace keepers’ vehicles!

I was accused of using the tragedy, to further my business. Perhaps if any of those people had taken the trouble to actually read what I wrote, they might have seen that no stage at all, did I link through to anything which attempted to sell any of Suitegum’s services. Every link in that blog is in support of my overall claim that the glare of millions of Twitter geniuses and sensationalists selling newspaper and web site advertising space can destroy the reputation of someone loved by almost everyone in South Africa, and many millions more in other countries. I thought I was careful to make the point.

It does not help to disregard the Pistorius debacle. Three weeks ago he had no concept of the problems he would face today. He simply did not know that he would have killed Reeva a few days later, and his income stream would be strangled so abruptly. We all run a similar risk in our businesses if we employ any people at all. It’s probably ok if your secretary, the filing clerk, the tea person or almost any of your clerical staff go missing for a while. Perhaps it is even ok if a machine operator is  absent for some time. But as I said last week: What about those key people:

• Your design engineer?
• Your software programmer?
• Your star salesperson – the rainmaker in the organisation?
• Your warehouse controller?
• Your chief of logistics?
• You?

My follow up then is to ask  what China Dodovu’s employers will do now that their key employee has been arrested and appears to be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. I wonder if that question will elicit as much outrage? Who knows, perhaps he is not key to the organisation; perhaps he does nothing anyway.

But what of Mido Macia? He is probably not key to his organisation, and nor, probably would be Prisoner A. These are all people who have appeared glaringly obvious in the news headlines around the world in the last two weeks; such is the nature of our society.

Stemming from all of these people, are repercussions for businesses and families, both upstream and downstream. Repercussions involving money, quite apart from the obvious heartache.

One thing which is almost (not entirely) absent from all the complaining emails I received was the fact that Reeva Steenkamp is dead. Her boyfriend has admitted in a written sworn statement to killing her. He has lots of money to pay public relations companies to ask people who use the tragedy to highlight a risk we all run (albeit quietly), to not refer to him as an “alleged murderer”. The rest of us are powerless against such requests and fighting them.

But whether it be the poor immigrant taxi driver, the disabled awaiting trial prisoner, the leader of a big organisation or the wealthy young killer with the world at his feet, in the event of an arrest on even a suspicion of wrong doing, there is fall out which has an eventual effect on the value of the organisation.

Post Script: Phil Cooper dropped me a mail last night to say that he had made enquiries in this regard. There is a Lloyds product called “Death and Dishonour” (would you believe). Unfortunately at the time of pressing “Update” no further particulars were available.