Something happening here. / What it is aint exactly clear. Leading newspapers opting for cheap glory of tabloid exposé on the tippling health minister after her alopecian recalcitrant deputy ministers was fired by a cantankerous president. Then the deputy president hits back with the backing of hordes on the minister’s multitasking management of indifference and questions the president’s bona fides.
Subsequently piques and cheviots fly from president cum columnists in his usually convoluted and vague as the oracle of Delphi on his on-line Letter; vituperating against the health deputy minister and syndicated newspaper columnists. In his typical philosophizing with a hammer and punchy journalistic prose he goes far, killing flies with a sledgehammer. And finds a companion of his bleak last days in the Trinidatan Indian guru and competent scholar turned biographer and expounder of the president intellectual history.
It was Tocqueville, the French philosopher of history, who said; “To keep silent is the most useful service that a mediocre talker can render to the public.” But has the howling quadragenarian youth league president, in search of events ever heard of Tocqueville? Having swallowed hook, line and sinker the rap of the kanga flipping guerrilla king, and learnt the chutzpah of not feeling guilty about greed, of replacing virtue with ambition; he’s been preaching the gospel of consumption as moral good.
Later-day millionaires, who long heeded the call before the quadragenarian opened his eyes, have themselves been sniffing for gold in the party political dung, attending any and every political cause of visibility, less they find ways to exploit the mayhem. Some have even gone ahead and sold their bearskin to foreign media markets in their life style politics before they even shot the bear. Having learnt the occidental art of making meaninglessness sound meaningful to they are busy garnering the voice of the chattering class, even greasing the hands of some syndicated journalists. You know what they say, money makes people impatient and the world go round.
Our public broadcaster meantime has been caught with its pants down between being his master’s voice and the demands of freedom. It is besotted by strong winds of reductionists nuances that makes it spit in its own dish. To be or not to be, whether it is correct to treat South African as adults or give them milk diet since its sophistication is not matured enough to sieve hokum from pocus.
Meantime, for their sins (or whatever materialists believe stead of), floundering communist provost after organising sporadic subversions pierce the shield of their defence with own spears by pilfering strained coffers of the Communist Party that is still collecting stranded bricks to rebuild the broken Berlin Wall. Their leading bloodhound, with his teeth sour in tongue, has just passed through the modern rite of passage (divorce), and opted fro marrying in the same breath and speed he divorced by. Talk about pouring new wine on old vets.
On the other side, sincere by half doddering former minister of law and disorder with the coterie of his generals and police commissioners overcame the past by hypocritical jarrings that nullified justice, and constructed themselves a convenient truth in the tragic expense of victims. They’ve managed to become the latest beneficiaries by passing themselves as victims of the system.
Leading opposition parties, disillusioned with their own sneaking pessimism and fears of republic of vandalism and anarchy in the offing, spend sleepless night trying to figure out ways of cashing in on the chaos. Confused whether to kill the white whale or wreck the ship they scamper helter-skelter; now announcing the coming doom; now putting their trust in the creative chaos of the times.
Rusty nails were finally driven through the walls of dinosaur pan africanist party by the court while battling to stay alive by firing and hiring their mealy mouthed president. The scheme thoroughly compacted the dizzying circle of their impotence like a donkey tied to a bucket pump that has become bored with its own fantasies. Their candle has burnt from both ends.
Wisely, the deputy president is spending this time picking mushrooms in the forest, a traditional Russian form of meditation. All this bolshie and blimpish is unsuitable for a lady. And any diligence in these bacchanalian times is misspent. All discerning wisdom to her and the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa; patience is always a virtue. Suffer the fools to hang themselves for the meek to inherit the earth.
Was it the former American president, Lyndon Johnson, who said; That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down.... But freedom is not enough…. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result….
And so freedom is not enough, especially in a culture that wishes to suppress individual conscience, and leaders who take too seriously these ironic words of Giancarlo Pajetta; “I have finally understood what pluralism is; it’s when lots of people share my point of view.”
Without being too paranoid we should always learn from history. And if the Russian history—hell we don’t even need to go that far when we have a clear example just across the Limpopo—teaches us anything it is that the start of a totalitarian regime begins with the steady elimination of critical media; obstruction of fair elections; murders of prominent critics of the regime; creation of a propaganda-fed groups with economic vested interests; imposition consent and criminalization of dissent. And usually the root of all this is the concentration of power in the hands of one tough guy at the top who sees himself as dauphin of the revolutionary cause.
Thou shall see me at Philippines; I mean Polokwane. Book me the first ticket to Polokwane; the circus is in that town this year, and the veils are coming off this time.
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