Power utility Eskom has been more than generous in its payment arrangements with the Zimbabwean authorities, waiving due date after due date.
Electricity provision continues without a hint of the Johannesburg-based parastatal cutting its supply. Harare's bill runs into tens of millions of rands.
But what is good for Bob is not, it seems, good for Langa. Back home, Eskom's actions have been utterly punitive. In the remote rural setting of Muden, KwaZulu-Natal, Lembede primary school's electricity has been cut off for the past year for non-payment.
Eskom bosses have issued a "policy" stipulating that a deposit of R2 000 plus arrear payments must be forthcoming before reconnection is authorised. How many other schools in the country suffer the same brutal lashing: 100, 1 000, 10 000? Now do the sums and you can see where at least part of the power company's revenue comes from. The real problem is that the children suffer while dividends continue to be handed to the state.
And Bob gets off scot-free.
Sanlam, the former Afrikaner powerhouse created in 1918 as a repository of white working class money to protect and build its economic muscle, is really onbeskof in its cash-flush status.
The financial services company plans to buy back R4 billion of its own shares following the shedding of most of its Absa stake to Barclays.
Its cash reserves now stand at a staggering R7 billion and its acquisitive eye is roaming the "for sale" and "to buy" companies' market.
Remember LeisureNet? Well, the financial treadmill continues in reverse at the former health and fitness company.
Liquidators Rob Walters and Richard Gainesford have issued a summons demanding that the gym chain's former directors be held personally liable for the firm's debt of R1.2 billion. When it was wound up, the Health & Racquet Club operator had just R302 million in assets.
The fingered directors - a smidgen of the empowered and a large dose of the less-empowered captains of industry - are opposing this.
One of these directors, Iqbal Surve, the chief executive of empowerment firm Sekunjalo, must be cursing himself for thinking that a pull-in pull-out strategy could rake in the millions.
My mother used to say that, no matter what, you always pay for your sins.
Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi often seems to be caught somewhere between the Scylla of union bashing and the Charybdis of benevolent state intervention (for the latter, she might even be accused by free market fundamentalists of being a communist).
The minister of public administration has let slip that market-driven solutions such as privatisation and outsourcing to improve service delivery have not lived up to expectations.
This illustrious SA Communist Party member has to juggle the trend in the government towards a "professionalisation" of services with the stark reality that the real people she made an oath to serve are increasingly not the primary beneficiaries of the budget allocations that have been made.
At Sasol, new chief executive Pat Davies, who has very, very strongly asserted his commitment to transformation, must be thinking the gods are smiling on his company. Shares in the petrochemicals giant powered through the R200 level to reach an all-time high of R206 on Wednesday.
Not only are earnings expected to rise for the year to June, but change is in the air and more women and darkies are actually going to be appointed to the company's lily white male boards.
Sasol benefits directly from rand-based commodity prices and apart from needing to add some colour to its executive machine, the company, which was kick-started by the National Party government in 1950 to produce oil from coal, is a frontrunner in the race for the "change according to the government of the day" title.
But then again, rank opportunism is the business of doing business, especially when you have to outmanoeuvre your competitors, and there are legions of companies that fit the bill.
Whatever you might think about Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, our minister of health does come up with challenging positions. But maybe that's because her deputy, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, is rooted in South African reality and is a very good listener.
The minister has thrown down the gauntlet and proposed there should be 35 percent black equity in health firms by 2010 and 51 percent by 2014.