Vanity awards give a veneer of erudition to fake achievers with the gall and cash to flaunt them
Dr Jacques grobbelaar, ceoof Stadium Management South Africa, the company contracted by the City of Johannesburg to manage FNB Stadium, Orlando Stadium, Dobsonville Stadium, and Rand Stadium is an amazing man.
For a start, few people could have received as many awards, both international and local, as he has over the past three years. (Check the list alongside!)
Over the past year the company’s CEO has spent an amazing amount of time and money – presumably mostly his employer’s time and money – travelling from one international awards event to the next: Mexico in March; Berlin, then Dubai in April (where he was awarded his honorary doctorate); back in Mexico on 9 June; straight on to Manchester UK on 11 June; Miami Beach, Florida on 25 July; London on 18 November; Las Vegas on 10 December; Oxford UK on 20 December.
Already scheduled for 2019: Lisbon on 10 February and Paris on 2 March. Interspersed amongst these were another half-dozen local award ceremonies.
Obviously Grobbelaar doesn’t spend much time in the office, but then who’s to complain; the MD of the company is his brother Bertie?
Are you uncharitable enough for this excess of awards to have made you just a tad suspicious? It did make Noseweek suspicious.
An internet search finds a September 2012 report – yes, that long ago already – in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times which reads:
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