The figure comes from the number of years the former president and apartheid icon served the public.

ends intro

At schools, universities, businesses, government offices around the country, South Africans will demonstrate the power of volunteerism.

They’ll spend at least 67 minutes painting orphanages, clinics and schools, weeding  gardens, spring clean old people homes or cooking  a meal and entertain their inmates.

There’s some competition to come up with the most helpful and imaginative idea.

Local and national media are hungry to snap up these stories.

President Jacob Zuma, who’s at the African Union Summit in Kigali, has issued a statement urging his compatriots to make their contributions meaningful.

Every member of his Cabinet will lead officials in giving their 67 minutes of service.

There is no legal obligation on anyone to make the sacrifice.

Yet it is difficult to imagine anyone not making an effort.

Mandela’s private secretary Zelda la Grange, who has become a keen motorcyclist,  will lead a rally designed to help restore the confidence of victims of gender based violence before roaring on to plant a vegetable garden for a women’s shelter.

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He leaves behind a still simmering row caused by the Zelda la Grange, the former personal assistant to Zuma’s late predecessor Nelson Mandela, saying she would feel more welcome in France than in her native South Africa.

La Grange says potential white investors from Europe and the United State should be told they’re not welcome in South Africa.

Zelda la Grange’s apologised for any hurt her remarks might have caused but she has not withdrawn her assertion that President Jacob Zuma’s making whites the scapegoat for South Africa’s ills.

Deputy telecommunications minister Hlengiwe Mkize proposes she and la Grange meet to go back to basics and discuss the evils of colonialism.

Zuma will have his work cut out at Davos selling the country’s national development plan in the teeth of new evidence that race remains a highly sensitive and potentially disruptive issue in South Africa 21 years after the ANC took power.

The ruling party’s incensed at a Constitutional Court decision overturning an election court ban on the opposition Democratic Alliance saying Zuma has stolen from the people by improperly enriching himself from the publicly funded upgrade of security at his private residence in Kwazulu/Natal.

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