I know that my bus stop is next when I see the Union Buildings. They never fail to impress, standing stark against the Highveld’s summer skies and, until very recently, flanked by purple-clad sentries.
Welcome to Pretoria in jacaranda season: abundant purples and blues, sweat-inducing heat and more government buildings than you can shake a parliamentary gavel at. Among said buildings is my new home for the next three months: the Government Pensions Administration Agency (GPAA).
A quick low-down on the GPAA: it’s pretty big and pretty important. The GPAA administers pensions for government employees on behalf of the Government Employees Pension Fund and National Treasury. This means that it deals daily with the needs of the Fund’s 1.7-million members and 300 000 pensioners, and has a whopping R1.2-trillion in assets under management.
Until the end of January 2014, I will be serving as the GPAA’s internal communications specialist – a new post for me in an unprecedented environment. Producing content for a weekly newsletter and a quarterly magazine, issuing company-wide notifications, writing and sub-editing countless internal documents, and finding human interest pieces among over 1 000 employees, have become part of my day-to-day.
Government life starts early, I have learned, and my days now begin shortly after dawn. This allows me enough time to make myself presentable; spend a blissful 40 minutes on the Gautrain, marvelling at the trees that swallow buildings whole in this part of the world; hop on a bus to the Union Buildings, take a brisk 10-minute walk, and arrive. I carry my laptop, a book and my lunch in a small backpack, which means I have spent the past three weeks feeling like a tourist in my own country: a recommended experience.
The GPAA offices themselves are a maze, an endless network of linoleum corridors that bear testament to the building’s original purpose: it was built as a hospital, but never used as one. If the high windows and ward-like offices don’t convince you, there is, I believe, a basement office that has a toilet in it, which should dispel some disbelief.
Working in a building that houses such a huge number of employees is odd. It brings with it an inevitable, and necessary, level of bureaucracy, and a pinch of politics to boot (I know: politics? In the government? I was shocked, too.) It means that I encounter hundreds of unfamiliar faces each day – I’m lying, usually I see only about 10 familiar and 10 unfamiliar faces a day, the other 980 are hiding out in departments defined by acronyms I am yet to decipher: OSS, EB, CM&E.
In an organisation this size, you have the sense that communicating en masse is important. There is no Flow Playroom where all 1 000 employees congregate for foosball championships. Give me time.
My days end with an umbrella. Fortunately, I have not yet been caught in an afternoon storm (though I come prepared with a pair of flip-flops every day, just in case). Instead, I use my umbrella to shield my pathetic Canadian-father-redhead-mother skin from the blistering 35-degree Pretoria heat. A bus trip, a train ride, and a tree-marvel later I am back in Johannesburg – home, dazed to find myself in government, happy for the experience, and curious about tomorrow’s political pursuits.
