Did you see that the powers-that-be want to appoint my eccentric brother Jon Qwelane as our ambassador to Uganda?

This is the self-same oke who, as far as one can tell, is not overly fond of feigeles, tends to get somewhat tired and emotional from time to time, and definitely does not spend too much of his day reading Dale Carnegie.

He seems ideal for the job, not so?

This is thinking out of the box, my chinas. It's a bit like appointing me as a special envoy to wherever the Hamas head office is these days; Paul Trewhela as head of the ANC's history archive; Andrew Donaldson, the plump, brassiere-obsessed columnist on the Sunday Times, as chief PR for Schabir Shaik; my other brother David Bullard, aka the Bullfinch, as chief PR for the Sunday Times; and Deon du Plessis, the publisher of the Daily Sun, as national press ombudsman.

In a certain sense it is, nonetheless, a bloody relief, isn't it?

I mean, I was beginning to worry that there was no one left in the presidency with a sense of humour. I have been well and truly disabused of that silly notion, haven't I?

Moving right along (as my employer, Kris K, in the US used to say), I have recalled recently - like this morning, dude - a story I was told some years ago about this kugel, quite a looker but I forget her name, who used to live in Los Angeles when I lived in San Francisco (I had no difficulties with feigeles - some of my best friends and all that).

Anyhow, she returned to the beloved country in 1990 soon after the Great Man was released, so that she could take part in the bloodless revolution and all that.

She was driving through Hillbrow one late morning (honkies still did that then) when a gentleman with a coffee-coloured epidermis slipped into her borrowed beemer (people didn't lock the doors then), put a gun to her well-tanned temple (I mean her head, not her love temple, you bozo!), and suggested she stop the car, get out, and leave it to him.

[Okay, now listen up, readers, this is not radio, TV, or a podcast. This is print, so you have to do the accents yourselves in the privacy of your fertile minds. By way of guidance: she was a kugel deluxe with the full-on Johannesburg, whiny, nasal twang - like one of my former colleagues on The Sunday Independent - and the hijacker, well, let's just say that he was in his late teens, previously rurally-based, and hadn't attended St John's or Waterford. And the conversation went like this:]

"But you can't do this to me," she wailed plaintively, "why, why, why are you doing this?"

The young hijacker cogitated about this question for what was, in the circumstances, a long time - maybe 90 seconds.

And then he replied, in a dignified manner: "Because, madam (pronounced "M-E-D-E-M" - you have to get this stuff right), I am a robber."

The point of this anecdote from my happy youth is not only that this was a criminal with professional pride but that criminals actually do exist, they are a sector of our society, and, this being the case, we need to know as much as possible about them.

And I labour this rather self-evident truth in the light - or is it darkness? - of what has taken place around and following a "report" on two criminals on e.TV.

Ben Said, e.TV's group news editor, and a very fine fellow (I might tell you) with a stylish bald pate to boot, and a laatjie reporter called Mpho Lakaje put together a report on some allegedly "real" criminals who said that it was going to be business as usual for them during the forthcoming soccer jamboree - i.e., they were going to rob tourists and, if they were in danger, they would, echoing the instructions of a number of senior security officials, "shoot to kill".

Oy-va-voy-lanu; the minister of police, Nathi Mthethwa, and the national police commish, Bheki "if you don't smaak my hat, I have others" Cele got beaucoup upset - some serious indignation there - and Said and Lakaje got subpoenaed, in terms of section 205 (ay, there's an old china from my yoof!), to come and tell the man in the chair who those "criminals" were and to hand over all their film.

(Complicating the issue considerably is that the man who was allegedly the link between the e.TV news team and the two criminals - or maybe he was also on the news clip, it's not yet clear - killed himself, allegedly as a result of the whole fuss ...)

At any rate, Sanef (the South African National Editor's Forum) - that's a bunch of editors who get together from time to time to shoot the shit, have a tincture or two, and make pompous statements - for once got it right. They said: No way; you can't make these journos come and tell you who those criminals were. They are, from a journalism point-of-view, "sources", and we don't give away our sources. Because, if we do, then people ain't gonna talk to us no more.

Right on, I say - if we clamp down on criminals talking to journalists, well, then they won't talk, and we don't get to know about them.

But I concede that there are some small difficulties in this matter. First of all, how do you know who is a real criminal? Unfortunately - or fortunately perhaps - criminals don't write research reports or dissertations or win Mondi Shanduka awards.

According to the Sowetan - whose reporter apparently saw the news clip (one of the biggest problems being that very few people, including me, did) - the reporter has written that one man wore a stocking over his head while the other was filmed loading a firearm.

Well, I don't know what a stocking over the head signifies. John Travolta did this too, in a bad movie about three middle-aged bikers that I saw the other night. As for loading a firearm, well, there was a time when I could load a R1-rifle blind-folded and smoking a Texan plain, in 0,5 seconds - and I'm no criminal, though I did once have a girlfriend who used to call me "a robber's dog". (The R1 had a folding butt, but it was in Tempe, not San Francisco.) In other words, how do we know anyway that these okes were for real?

A second difficulty is that, assuming these bozos were legitimate, in what way are they "sources"? They were the subjects of the stories - but not sources. They never gave any information leading to the writing of a story or unraveling of an investigation. They were the story, or what they claimed - that they'd rob tourists and shoot to kill, blah blah - was the story.

Anyway, just as I was getting used to the idea of Qwelane as our man in Kampala (see first paragraphs), one of my bosses, Tawana Kupe, the dean of humanities at Wits, said, according to the Sowetan, that: "We have two men, armed, probably with unlicensed firearms, threatening the biggest event (World Cup) in the world. Surely their qualification as sources falls away."

What? Who cares whether the firearms are licensed or not? I would assume in any case that it would be sort of de rigueur for criminals to have unlicensed firearms. And, as already seems obvious, these okes weren't sources anyway.

But the issue still does remain: if journalists can't keep to themselves the identities of those to whom they speak, and who want to remain unidentified, then there're plenty of people who are not going to speak to them. Journalists are supposed to be journalists - not policemen or PR men for the world cup.

But let me be fair to Kupe - especially as I'd like to keep my job - and bear in mind that the Sowetan does have a propensity for tugging quotes wildly out of their context and for truncating them badly.

The thing is, I think, that everyone in the land is a trifle touchy because of the impending soccer jamboree and especially as hordes of people in the rest of world apparently think that Cabinda, Angola is hard by the Parkview golf course.

Oh well, watch out for okes with stockings on their head and loading firearms, especially if there's a news crew close by.

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