 
THABANG CHILOANE'S SPEECH AT THE MEDIA BREAKFAST4 April 2002 Royal Hotel, Durban
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen and colleagues in the media. It is indeed a pleasure and an honour to have you here. I think your presence here indicates the seriousness with which you take your work and relations with the Department of Transport in KwaZulu-Natal. Seeing you seated there attentively reminds me of a certain learned friend of mine who on his first day of lecturing at one of the esteemed centres of tertiary education in the country, said the following to his class of law students. He said that he was going to teach them a lot in that academic year. However, there was a slight problem, half of what he was going to tell and teach them was untrue. But that was not the problem, the issue was he did not know which part of the lectures were going to be true! In this vein, colleagues, I do understand the scepticism with which some of you may be approaching this occasion. The truth is that I have asked you here purely because I am new in the province because I have joined the Department of Transport as Chief Director Communication and Public Safety. It is also because it is said in my mother tongue, Sepedi, ‘Ditaba ditswa mahlong’ loosely translated means that we talk better face to face. My new position then requires that I also have a great deal of interaction with media practitioners in a variety of roles. Thus I saw it appropriate to introduce myself to you. For those that I have not met yet or spoken to on the phone it is then an opportunity to put the face to the voice. For those of you whom I have not met, it is then an opportunity to meet and make acquaintances. I hope then after that after we have broken this fast, it will also be symbolising the start of a new era with the Department of Transport. We hope that we will develop a mature and professional working relationship to enable one another to do our jobs better. As a former journalist, I appreciate a cordial and professional relationship with the media. As a public servant, working for a major source of news on a daily basis, I consider honesty and professional relations to be essential with the media. My staff and I will strive to always provide you with the best assistance we can muster. In return, we hope to receive the same mutual assistance from you, our colleagues in the media. We pledge to be of assistance to you as much as we can possibly be. As a result we have acquired the following equipment to help this task…. For Radio Journalists we are going to be able to provide you with sound grabs to be used for your news bulletins as regularly as we can get them. This will be in circumstances where you have not been able to attend our functions due a variety of reasons. We will email or phone through the sound to you. The sound will be professionally recorded using the latest digital state of the art equipment which we have just purchased. As a former radio journalist and a trained broadcast journalist I will be able to provide you with broadcast quality material for publication. The sound will also be accompanied by text which you need for your story. For Print Journalists… we will be able to send via email photo images that you can use along with the media releases that we will continue to mail to you. For Television journalists… we are planning on being able to supply you with the necessary footage, however, we still need to employ the necessary personnel with the relevant expertise to do a professional job in this regard. All this is indeed aimed at fulfilling our constitutional obligation to provide the public with information that is accurate, timeous and useful to their lives. We are relying then on good relations that we hope to foster and cultivate among us to achieve this obligation which is like a calling to most if not all of us here. As Government, we acknowledge that we are fallible beings. We make mistakes. Sometimes some of us are mature enough to admit those mistakes sometimes not. You will, within your right and duty criticise these when they happen. Vice versa I beg of you that we also see things that are not pleasing to us, you accept our criticism in the maturity of professionals. I acknowledge that the relationship between the media and government can never be too cosy, as one of your functions as media, is to be a watchdog. We all know that a watchdog is tasked with guarding someone’s property. The question I am then posing to you is whose property are you watching at whose or what expense? If it is indeed the public interest we are serving it should then be all the public. We hope that as from today we will, together, ensure that to serve the interest of this public or these publics is always our main aim. I hope to see you all next week on the 10th April 2002 at the legislature in PMB for the Department’s Budget Speech. The media conference will be at the legislature at 13h00 to allow you the chance to file your stories in time. The actual speech will be tabled at 15h00. There will also be a cocktail/buffet in the evening at the same venue at which you are also invited. We will also send you written invites soon. To update our record we urge you to please you fill in the register of attendance to ensure that we have the right details and we can always keep you in touch with what is happening at the Department. If you have brought your business cards please be so kind to leave some with us. You will notice that we have asked for your publication/broadcast deadlines on the register. This is to ensure that we assist you in meeting your publication deadlines. To conclude, in my standard two year, we had a rather strict and over confident teacher who taught us English and she tasked us to compose a sentence with the following three words, defence, details and defeat…. Let’s defeat the ends of disinformation, misinformation and ill information of our people, communities and nation. Please feel free to ask me questions and enjoy the rest of the meal. Thanks for your attendance, may God bless us all.
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