Before I begin, a little bird has just trilled in my ear this very moment that by the time you and I have finished munching our muesli this Thursday morning, our esteemed president, JG Zuma, will already be immersed in the great cabinet shuffle of 21 October 2010.

Could this be so? We'll soon see won't we?

If yes, remember that you read it here first. If not, well, you can just say that that fool Gordin has got it wrong again. And now to what I was going to say.

Oh dear, oh bother: all around me the wheels seem to be falling off. Given the shrill screeching of axles gouging into the roads, I can hardly hear myself think.

Let's begin with this young chappie Gareth Cliff. He's apparently a DJ known to people of the same age as my children and also a judge in some musical programme that my youngest child (12) watches.

He looks a bit like Tintin or the mildly tousled, dough-faced boys I encountered in locker rooms when I played rugby in south Sweden in the mid-seventies, though not as hefty. (Yeah, I know: you didn't know they played rugby in Sweden. Well, they do - or rather the hordes of Englishmen who were then working and studying in the Lund and Malmö area did.)

Good thing, though, that Cliff's not a babe magnet - because I got into so much trouble two weeks ago for using that phrase with regard to a certain leading democrat that I'm glad I don't have to do it again.

But I am feeling quite pissed off with Cliff. Here he is, some DJ, as I say, and he's gone and written an open letter to Zuma (see here). Now this in itself is fair enough; I think more people should write open letters to JGZ, though they needn't necessarily be as crass as Cliff is. (He talks at one point about there being "more presidential bastard children". He sounds like some of the rude and unruly people who write messages on this site.)

Anyway, what annoys me is that the following appeared in The Times: "Presidential spokesman Zizi Kodwa said yesterday he was not aware of the website letter but contacted Cliff after The Times sent him a copy.

"Kodwa, who is in Egypt with Zuma on a state visit, told The Times that he had ‘requested a meeting with Gareth Cliff when I return on Thursday or Friday so that I can understand better the issues he is raising. Suffice to say we have noted the letter and we are extremely worried about its tone. We have decided to meet Gareth urgently to give him an opportunity to explain himself,' he said."

You could have blown me down with the proverbial feather! I recently wrote an open letter to Zuma for two men who have been incarcerated for 17 years for a crime they didn't commit (see here) - and I had to explain painstakingly to my old china, Zizi "Top" Kodwa, and to someone in the presidential office how to find the relevant pages in the Mail&Guardian and on Politicsweb.

And ZZ Top wasn't remotely interested in discussing the case of Mofokeng and Mokoena. Yet, even from the shadow of the sphinx, while eating humus and smiling at Hosni Mubarak's courtiers, he's willing to set up a meeting with dough-boy.  

But now here's the greater problem. Cliff wrote the following: "...I address this to everyone in government - the whole lot of you - good, bad and ugly (that's you, Blade)".

Uh-oh. See? We're back to that babe magnet thing again. Because - well, I'm afraid I have to say it - our Blade does rather think of himself as a babe magnet. And Blade, as some people have noticed, is not in a good space just now.

You might have heard his "special" adviser - whose name escapes me, thankfully - rabbiting on during the David O'Sullivan show on 702 the other day about how Mary Metcalfe had finished what she'd been appointed to do and was therefore moving on.

This was - not to put too fine a point on it - bullshit. As director-general, Metcalfe is also the ministry's accounting officer and she had queried some costs related to a planned jamboree to Cuba. Nzimande viewed these queries as an aspersion on his integrity - and that, children, was that.

Let me tell you something else, though I can't name any names just now. It's not going to be too long before someone else senior is going to be hitting the road away from the ministry of higher education. Remember: you read it here first.

But what's going on with Blade? Some folk claim Nzimande's mood might partially be the result of too many tinctures of an evening. On Monday 702's Stephen Grootes wrote a fine piece analysing Nzimande on the Daily Maverick website (see here).

Grootes says that Nzimande has been badly hobbled by becoming a minister - so much so that he seems to have turned himself into a caricature of a paranoid Stalinist boss immolating himself from the inside with anger, frustration and paranoia.

But Cliff and Nzimande seem relatively stable and calm when one thinks about The New Age - which has suddenly, without the benefit of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, turned into The Old Age.

The folks apparently at the top of the editorial pile there - Vuyo Mvoko as well as Karima Brown, Vukani Mde, Amy Musgrave and Damon Boyd - have all gone walkies.

Peter Bruce of Business Day must check his archived e-mails (if he knows how to); I told him Ms Brown would be back within a few months. 

The guys should have been a little more circumspect ... that Karima, a lovely woman but always a bit inclined to be a trifle tired and emotional at times.

They should also have been a little more patient with their boss, Atul "Guppy" Gupta. He, as you know, has had a bit of a trying time - he was stopped in a police road block and at the police station, he was given a filthy glass; and also he's building (in Saxonwold, I think) and building in this country could traumatize the toughest of souls.

I don't know why the famous five resigned. Word is that they thought the product wasn't ready for launching - and that management simply wouldn't listen to them.

Oh well, I always feel sad when a newspaper closes down. I feel particularly sad when it closes down without having opened. One less place in which open letters can appear; one less place at which Blade Nzimande can fulminate.

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