Thomas Johnson - The Blog

Imagine my surprise when I saw Daily Maverick’s feature on Wednesday July 4 about  Groote Schuur Hospital’s Trauma Centre .  There in the last photo is one of the doctors, Mikhail Botha, who contributed to my mother's death on 7 July 2017. (See my previous  blog posts . Botha allegedly removed her life support without contacting the family after which she died of resultant respiratory and heart failure.)   He’s the one wearing green scrubs and the hipster goatee. Our criminal (on, off, on, off again) and professional charges to the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) about the incident are still open. He is a respondent to both.  Cape Town's Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) messed the case badly and now apparently don't know what to do about it. Wynberg Magistrates Court’s senior state prosecutor rejected it as an inquest due to "jurisdictional problems".   Out of the blue, last month I heard from a police colonel,...

Across from the house the city is laying water pipes, an initiative to use treated sewerage water to irrigate parks and sport fields.   Overnight, weekends and downtime a security guard watches over a Cat excavator.   He stands around doing nothing else, or because it’s cold and raining, sits in its tiny cabin. I think the machine can look after itself, though. This is what American anthropologist David Graeber, professor at the London School of Economics, calls bullshit jobs : “pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us working”.   (He has become a cause célèbre and expanded the theory into a book published May 2018.) Many of us have had one.   In the 1990s I worked for firm of consulting engineers.   During the preliminary, design phase of a project (as it later turned out, my last at the firm), the engineer-in-charge instructed me to perform calculations for an office block again and again.   Each week I presented the results.   He lo...