Page 16 - MiNDSPACE Issue 2 2022 - Old Mutual Corporate

interview impactSPACE
‘I can’t really make a plan unless I understand the situation on the ground .’
Anneliese Burgess
is an award-winning investigative journalist, co-editor of Vrye Weekblad and the
author of Heist! South Africa’s Cash In Transit Epidemic Uncovered (Penguin Random House South Africa).
had stock. We did not waste time. We started bringing in trucks from Sutherland and Tsitsikamma. Then we collected water in Cape Town and brought in 20 superlink trucks from there.
‘We were getting a lot of requests from community leaders, from councillors, mayors, from the media, businesspeople. As always, I assessed them and looked at the options, at the feasibility of different approaches, what we have to do first, and what we can do last. Then the teams ran with it.’
‘It’ meant hot meals, food parcels, blankets, bottled water, warm clothes, sanitary pads and diapers. Search and rescue. A helpline to coordinate missing-person reports.
14 | oldmutual.co.za/corporate
BEING BOTH HANDS-ON AND HANDS-OFF
GOTG is a big, extremely effective organisation with exceptional logistical capabilities. Community networks across the country. Warehouses in big cities. Trucks and teams that are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.
Sooliman eschews corporate structures and hates red tape. He mostly works from home or on the road and famously runs GOTG with four cellphones that accompany him everywhere. ‘They are lying in front of me as we speak,’ he tells me.
‘One is a public phone. The whole country can call me on it. Street sweepers, caretakers, schoolteachers and people in squatter camps. It’s on the website. Everybody has that number. I don't take these calls when
PHOTOGRAPHER: ANDY LUND