Mediaboss Marketing

IT'S gratifying to see that when the SA Revenue Service comes knocking the money it collects doesn't just go to buying piles of The New Age newspaper for security guards at the SABC and Eskom to prop their coffee on.

No, it's far better that government departments use your hard-earned cash on full-page advertisements, cunningly disguised as actual news.

You might have noticed last week's full-page advertorials in the Sunday Times, City Press and Independent, designed to masquerade as real news, entitled "Absa and AllPay lose bid". Giant pictures of Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini adorned the page, above captions saying "Vindicated".

The subject of this ad is a major issue involving one of the country's largest tenders, worth R10bn, to distribute social grants to 15million South Africans.

The tender started an almighty spat between Absa's subsidiary AllPay (which lost) and Net1 (which won).

Net1, led by charismatic businessman Serge Belamant and listed on Nasdaq and the JSE, is said to have done nasty things to win the tender.

This was after the earlier welfare tender was cancelled in 2009 when one of the judges, Norman Arendse, said he was approached by Gideon Sam in 2007, saying Net1 had an open chequebook for adjudicators.

Then in August, the High Court ruled the tender illegal because of various problems, saying the lowering of AllPay's scores was "unfair and irrational" and seemingly done for an "ulterior purpose".

Despite that, the court refused to scrap the tender as it would prejudice the beneficiaries, who needed the cash to survive.

So Absa appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal to have it scrapped.

More:
LAST WORD: Full story still to be told on Net1 v Absa