There are times, oh it is true, when even the most disciplined and dedicated of public servants fall short in the execution of their duties. There must have been the Sunday morning when Sting rose from his tantric bed and stretched and yawned and said, "Oh, to hell with the Amazon rain forest.

"I'm going to eat a big breakfast and watch a video and someone else can worry about the plight of the benighted painted tribes of the tributaries."

Even the most glossy-lipped of Miss Worlds must have those times when they stamp their feet and cry out, "I'm taking a break! World peace is just going to have to happen without me today! Plus, I'm hungry. Are you going to finish that salad?"

Perhaps even Graeme Hart has had the odd secret moment when he's thought, "You know, I'm just not going to count the pollen today. No, I'm not. Now let them see how well they get along without me."

Any politician who isn't discreetly evasive from time to time is flat-out lying

I do not count myself among such martyrs to the public good, but I confess I recently shirked my own slight responsibilities. And alas, I have been reminded of it. My mailbox this week has positively bulged, if that is not an inelegant word, with the indignant voice of the reader.

Ordinarily I do not get much by way of mail, and what there is usually consists of rent demands, threats from Helmut Lotti and increasingly irate missives from a gentleman in Cape Town who insists I have been consistently misspelling my name for the past four years. Once I received a handwritten letter from a 30-year-old man in Lagos claiming to be my son. But this week I received communications of an altogether different nature.

How, they demanded, could I have failed to record the most spectacular televised natural phenomenon of the decade so far? The mail refers, of course, to last week's total eclipse of the sun, and more particularly to SABC2's coverage of the eclipse, in the figure of the ever-game Vuyo Mbuli, reporting from Musina. I can't think of a better man for the job. Vuyo is always sprightly and dapper and keen, and has the added advantage of actually looking like an eclipse when viewed from above. Not that I have ever viewed Vuyo Mbuli from above. Or below, I hasten to add.

Oh, how I would have cherished the sight of Vuyo picking his way through the usual throng of eclectics and eccentrics and ecstatics and echolalics and echopraxics and ecclesiastics and ecotourists and ecdysiasts who always seem to pitch up for an eclipse.

The experience was reported to me in loving detail by friends and acquaintances ("And then... ho, ho, ho... and then he asked someone, heh, heh, 'So why are you here?' ... hoo!") but of course it's not the same as being there. I myself was deep in the soggy heart of the Okavango delta at the time, sitting beneath a spreading baobab tree, peering through the silver foil lining of a box of teabags at a darkening sun in a cloudless sky, while all around lions roared their evening roars and frogs croaked their evening croaks. It was beautiful, but it wasn't Vuyo.

So, chastened, I was determined not to miss this week's big event. The President Speaks (SABC2; Thursday; 8.30pm) was an hour-long show in which President Thabo Mbeki answered questions, and statements that sometimes resembled questions, posed by Freek Robinson and Vuyo Mvoko, not to be confused with the more famous Mbuli.

I have not on many occasions heard the president make himself available for local questioning - to the extent that I was surprised the show didn't have an exclamation mark at the end ("The Rand Strengthens!"; "The Springboks Win!"; "The President Speaks!"). On the evidence of Thursday night, however, he would be well advised, if only he had good advisers, to do it more often.

To be sure, there were blank spots in the discussion. The words "Mugabe", "Zimbabwe" and "HIV" were scarcely mentioned, and Vuyo Mvoko managed to ask a couple of questions that had even the president blinking in surprise.

"Do you share the frustration that the discourse around farm invasions and crime is given to the kind of hyperbole that detracts from what the government is doing for its people and the fact that democracy has benefited everyone?" asked Vuyo.

That is not a question; that is what Private Eye magazine used to describe as a journey to the province of Arslikhan.

On the whole, though, it was a worthwhile exercise. Some of the ministers and premiers and so-called spokespersons around the country would do well to learn from their president's manner of being interviewed.

Mostly he impressed as being frank and fair and clear, with a grasp of issues to make President George Bush jingle his spurs in envy. There were obviously moments of discreet evasion, but discreet evasion is becoming to a politician. Any politician who isn't discreetly evasive from time to time is flat-out lying.

Most impressive were those moments when the president articulated the principal moral predicament of civil society - prosperity as the only gauge of success, material wealth as the sole measure of a man. In his quiet, convincing intensity you caught a glimpse of his potential to be a genuinely inspiring moral leader.

President Mbeki is a remote and sometimes enigmatic figure, and it needn't be the case. When he speaks semi-formally, as on Thursday night, he can inspire a reaction of confidence and almost of intimacy among ordinary people like me. The anxiety comes when he disappears into the machine and only the echoes of his voice are heard, channelled and scrambled through the broken telephone of his staff to a wondering public. No nation needs to know its leaders, but it needs the impression that it knows them. Thabo Mbeki should chat to us more often.