For this writer, I imagine South Africa a lot like being the ‘sane’ staff who find themselves tasked with overseeing the goings on of a mental institution. Most days you wing through the motions. The mayhem, noise, the guy who violently mutilates his head against the wall, the woman who swears that she was once Mrs Christ, Jesus’s wife, and she and Judas were willing accomplices on a scheme to do the Nazarene dirty so they could finally be together and have a child they’d ultimately name Brenda Fassie.
Apparently the spiritually-inclined Son of Man wasn’t big on matters of the flesh and Iscariot wasn’t much of a loyal disciple. Hence, she soon figured, driving a wedge between the two wouldn’t be too difficult. The Rabbi simply had to go if she and her maskhwapheni (lover) were to have the child who would become a pop starlet in an unscrupulous country where the president goes by the sobriquet of Cupcake. In her expansive moments, she weeps disconsolately over the thirty pieces of silver that the bastard did away with before doing himself in, but takes solace that in this land down south, ill-gotten wealth is the nation’s prayer. The ends, if they entail a bounty, justify the means, even if those means include heartless hitmen with lots of guns.
From parliament to town councils, church to schools, soldiers’ palms being greased at the border or the traffic official swindling you for a cooldrink to make the ticket go away, everybody is apparently up for the take. How about the public service’s ghost employees drawing princely sums from in front of the television? Or that Cupcake himself is nowadays most famous for pulling the most cliched of gangster moves: stashing obscene sums of foreign currency under his mattress.
In the movies it’s getaway money, in SA it’s a dubious buffalo sale that seems to have flown under the radar of the country’s fiduciary laws. One person who wasn’t fooled, though, is the one that very few of South Africa’s rich can do without – the pinafore-clad domestic worker. According to reports, she cunningly devised an elaborate scheme of her own that saw a brazen heist on one of the president’s farms. In the aftermath, the culprits were allegedly put to some state-endorsed vigilante justice where they were apprehended, roughed up – but seemingly because the issue would likely cause the president a minor scandal – were ultimately told to watch it and let go.
Like the happenings within an asylum, such yarns would sound bizarre to those from orderly places but to the staff, just as to every South African, we know better. For us it’s as everyday as the deployee who’s charged with a massive infrastructure development project even though he turned his back on Science in high school. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more absurd than parliamentarians being reduced to nodding step and fetches by a trio of Indian nationals, comes the prisoner who remotely held a business conference from his cell, later pulling off an escape so daring that Hollywood’s finest were falling all over themselves for rights to the documentaries.
Over the last few weeks and months, the country has been cackling itself silly on account of such gaffes. Laughing here being very subjective because laughing emojis are hardly a dependable yardstick to gauge the real sentiments of the individuals who post them. It’s a feigned mirth because what does one do when the leader of the Free World is a narcissistic fascist and those on our own front yard might be what President Paul Kagame castigated as leaders who are actually idiots earlier this year? In the bigger scheme of things, you’re helpless. With the recourse of mental illness, you could knock your head against the wall but you don’t, so you laugh even as talks of America and Israel having sinister intentions on Mzansi abound.
Even as you wonder what the implications of USAid might look like on the hospital floor or why Afriforum are stoking the flames or on whether Jozi’s decline to seed can really be reversed. If the City of Gold degenerates down that path what hope is there for our less affluent cities, excluding Cape Town. Would that not signify the death of ANC (black) governance, ostensibly bearing out the words of the racist P. W. Botha in relation to African leadership? How does one run to the ground a land with such vast wealth beneath it? And then you remember something that left an entire country questioning their Geography education and had many more wondering whether this was really the best our government had to offer.
Faced with accusations of misusing public funds when – around the time of her anniversary celebrations – she’d taken her husband along on working trips to Switzerland and the US, former communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams’ response left a bulk of the country so shocked as to reduce it to hilarious memes and savage lampooning. Defending herself on an eNCA interview Ndabeni-Abrahams looked us deadpan and delivered this: ‘Do you think I would take my husband to a wedding anniversary in Switzerland? I’ve never been to Switzerland. My husband has never been to Switzerland. We went to Geneva…’
Nothing funny, but we laughed anyway whilst others frantically consulted Google just to check whether Geneva was still a famous city in Switzerland.
Where such blunders were once almost exclusively ANC terrain, the GNU gravy train has recently expanded the surface area considerably to include a host of dimwitted cock-ups. For the most part they appear to indicate that the GNU is something of an asylum where the dictatorial in nature aren’t big on consultation and those who might be open to it don’t like having to go through people from opposing parties. So what do you ultimately get as a citizenry but mixed messages and stupid mistakes?
Take DA leader and Minister of Agriculture’s John Steenhuisen, once a vociferous voice against issues like cadre deployment, who almost six months ago appointed the controversial podcaster Roman Cabanac as his chief of staff. Despite a massive public outcry pertaining to Cabanac’s qualifications and his previous divisive online utterances, Cabanac remains in his position. Steenhuisen tells anybody who would care to listen that the appointment was a ‘mistake’ and that he is ‘desperately’ waiting for action to be taken but Cabanac continues to get a bank notification every payday. Now, what does that tell us of the DA, the party that fashions itself as the one that stands against corruption and government officials who continue to draw huge salaries whilst on suspension? For one who claims to take his enemies head on, turns out on Cabanac, Steenhuisen is as meek as an earthworm. The chief of staff has not been afraid to throw his boss under the bus, telling the media that he too has seen Steenhuisen’s media claims but that the Minister has not communicated anything formal with him. Suddenly what had seemed like an upstanding opposition leader is starting to resemble the pigs on Jones’s farm who soon take on the habits of their former enemy as soon as they get close enough to smell the milk.
Then there is the Minister of Health, the good Dr Aaron Motsoaledi who not only caught us all unawares this month but may have unawarely made the President look like he was talking through both sides of his mouth earlier this year. In his State of the Nation Address, President Ramaphosa said that he wanted ‘South Africa to be leading in the commercial production of hemp and cannabis.’
Then, seemingly without consulting anybody, Motsoaledi went on to sign a law that immediately banned the sale, importing and manufacturing of all cannabis-infused food products (popularly known as edibles). Needless to say, unprovoked, the Minister invited hostile backlash, possible class action and ticked-off informal operators calling for his head. Barely a few weeks later the Minister found himself having to eventually withdraw the regulations pending further regulations.
There, dear reader, you have the first lot of higher-ups who make living in the country feel a lot like an unplanned stay at a chaotic mental institution. In the first quarter of the year, these are but a few of a swathe of leaders that simply got it wrong, many of whom were too far gone to realise it. The only difference between the woman who claims motherhood to the late Brenda and the politicians is that her story is, apart from thoroughly entertaining, harmless. And Brenda is the sort of national treasure that the whole country miss. The same cannot be said for the leaders. With them, we might laugh, but then again, we could just as easily find bombs being dropped on our heads. And that, my bru, is not bloody funny.