Ask a pump jockey

THE Bulgarian-trained newshounds who now run the SABC news departments have come up with a new slant on how to drag information out of the oil industry -- ask a pump attendant. Those who had the misfortune to tune into SAFM on Sunday ( yesterday0 for the one o'clock news would have heard an earnest reporter engaged in quizzing a BP service station attendant on the shortages of fuel caused by the strike of various unions in the industry clamouring for an increase in their already generous wages. What is interesting about this is that the SABC clearly has no idea that in South Africa petrol attendants are not employed by the oil companies but by the service station operators who, by law, are not allowed to be owned and managed by the oil companies. ( Self service is also banned to protect attendants' jobs). The joke is that any comments by pump attendants are totally irrelevant and hardly qualify as news. Not that our radio hacks care, of course. Mind you, as Spigot has often commented, the oil industry's congenital secrecy is partly to blame.