Big Julies chat show remorse.

A moment’s silence for the victims of the Victorian bushfires.

That was the sign plastered on the screen as I walked into the house this morning at the beginning of the game between a team called the Hurricanes and another called the Warratahs in the opening round of games in this year’s Super 14 professional rugby competition between teams from Oz, New Zealand and the glorious Republic of South Africa/Azania: the blog’s home turf.

The bushfires are a horror story and this bloggist’s sympathies go out to those worthy citizens who were cooked in their homes while watching the Sunday roast simmering in their ovens. Should it transpire that the fires were indeed started deliberately then may the perpetrators rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives and may they be shagged up the rear twenty times daily during that time, with a mechanical shagger. Why only twenty times you may ask … indeed.

However I felt that a moment’s silence would be more appropriate here at home, for the death of reason. We have this week witnessed the assassination of a crucial part of our judicial system by a collection of miserable party hacks, whose best contribution to the furtherance of our society would have been, never to have been born; failing which may they all die soon… not necessarily roasted; and of course: naturally.

All week I have heard a new mantra being trotted out to rationalise an unruly termination. The head of the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA], one Mr Vusi Pikoli, was fired because of considerations related to NATIONAL SECURITY.

Precisely what it was that constituted a threat to the national security condition was never spelled out notwithstanding umpteen investigations, and so we, the ignorant masses, are left with this conundrum:

Mr Pikoli’s sin was to charge the National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi with corruption. Surely a corrupt police chief is a threat to national security? Mr Selebi has yet to have his day in court and like a good many other prominent citizens caught with their hand allegedly inside a cookie jar they are fighting all the way to the court room [and in the process creating a great deal of useful democratically inspired precedential law.]

During this same week the Pomeranian [UK] government announced that from next month no person with an SA passport would be allowed into the UK without a new shiny visa. Explaining their reasoning, this week a spokesperson for the Pom local administration offices said it was because our passport control procedures were so lax they effectively posed a threat to the National Security requirement of the Pom government.

Surely this incompetent handling of passports should have all the perpetrators on the carpet for violating national security since their evil ways are demonstrably more problematic for the country that the arrest of an allegedly corrupt policeman.

Again during the week the chief executive of the National Airline: an airline that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and consistently loses huge sums of money, was ‘sent on leave’, in the words of a pole poster, because of an alleged scandal involving the cronyist issuing of airline food supply tenders to preferred special bidders. This comes after a furore involving the issuance of a shuttle service tender to other cronies to move passengers from the airport to other venues. It turned out that the winning bidder in the transport case had no transport facilities and consequently had to hire them from the losing bidders apparently. Maybe they took over the losing bidders. Presumably the food delivery tender winner similarly anticipates buying up his loser rivals, and using their facilities.

Surely the possibility of mal-nourishing foreign travellers and then leaving them stranded in random places inter-airports constitutes some form of threat to national security? Shouldn’t the errant CEO be fired for causing such havoc? Why does he get to have a paid holiday for so obviously damaging the country’s affairs when Mr Pikoli is to be fired and have his career ruined simply because he did the job he was hired to do? Can you understand the conundrum I face here?

I think we should have a moment’s silence for the absurdity of an unclarified threat to National Security.

On another scale of proportions this week, a man called Julius Malema made a series of speeches in which he serially insulted, firstly a long established figure in the local political lexicon, an Amakosi [Chieftain] called G. M. Buthelezi, whom he described as a Mugabe style dictator and vowed to recruit the man’s relatives to his own party. Then he turned on a minister from his own party, Mrs Naledi Pandor [Min’ of Education] and rebuked her for not attending to educational matters over the closing of a major educational institute, the Tshwane University of Technology [TUT]. [TUT students and staff have been rioting and demonstrating for some weeks. The police broke up demonstratyions with shotguns and rubber bullets which a cameraman caught being fired by a prostrate cripple at point blank range… nasty.]

He then made some needlessly hurtful remarks regarding the Minister’s “fake American accent”… I was uncertain watching him on television making his assertion whether he was being ironic or genuinely believes Mrs Pandor’s ‘toney’ colonial type 'Received English' presentation to be a fake American accent.

He is supposed to have conveyed his apologies unconditionally and privately to Mrs Pandor for what Mrs Duarte, one of the ruling party’s chief spokespersons, called unacceptable rudeness to an elder – Mr Malema is the ageless head of the ruling party’s youth wing: an unruly and demanding part of the party structure, and generally pretty independent of the party from all accounts.

Public opinion seems firmly against Mr Malema.This I noted while following the various phone-in shows randomly during the week. Allowing for the possibility that the radio talk back shows orchestrate the responses to support their position which seems difficult to achieve then an overwhelming majority found him to be either rude, arrogant or unschooled. Perhaps that latter is why he finds Mrs Pandor’s upper, upper middle class English dialect intimidating: it does that to people.

Now generally I agree with the common view that Mr Malema seems rude, arrogant, insensitive and disrespectful. We are after all a society that does the Ubuntu thing which, as I understand it [and I really don’t. It seems a bit like Zen… the moment you think you can describe it, it becomes something else], ubuntu is all about our essential common humanness: and thus identification. Every person is my person. Okaay! Way to go.

Is Julius Malema however, a “Naughty Boy” as one newspaper demeaningly suggested in one of its headlines this week?

Surely in a free society there is no obligation on any citizen to be polite. This random idea that the revolting Mr Malema is somehow obliged to show respect to people whom he obviously despises, perhaps, for instance, for: age or class or gender reasons, is inherently feudal: the antithesis of democracy. There is no mention of such obligation in the Constitution.

Undoubtedly we prefer to live in a polite society and Ubuntu rulz in that respect. We also understand the old movie industry dictum about being nice to people on your way up because you may need them on the way back down again. [We also note the dissenting observation that one meets a completely different class of person on the descent.].

Given all these things, he still has the right to say what he wants, no matter that he is abrasive in his manner. It is his right to tell the truth as he sees it, in plain blunt language that leaves nothing to the imagination. In truth his target market is too famished through malnourishment and poverty and endemic unschooled ignorance, to comprehend subtlety on any but a limited scale.

They all understand rage.

Ultimately Mr Malema’s boundaries should be determined by the laws pertaining to defamation and libel, on the basis that ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’. They should not be; and under our Constitution they are not constrained by, any feudal obligations to appreciate “Noblesse Oblige” on the part of those perceived to be supplicant “royals” pursuing actions of which one disapproves.

While referring to Mrs Pandor though I note that her accent seems to be rubbing off in the world overwhelmed by her charges… schoolchildren. During the week whilst boredly channel surfing on my DSTV system, I fixated for its last twenty minutes on an inter-schools dance competition. [What, where, I don’t know: I was surfing.] The programme in which I dropped so unexpectedly was retrospective, featuring short clips of a series of umpteen competing secondary schools, presumably from what are referred to as “previously disadvantaged” areas around the country. Not one name rang even a tinkle of familiarity. Thus I presumed them to be the much despised “township/rural” schools.

Well: Bravo. What a superb series of performances. Each dance routine taking the viewer from some traditional or quasi-traditional heritage interpretation to contemporary Kwaito and MTV inspired hip hop-dance. The moves were mostly good, slick and given what we are led to believe about 'poor Model T' schools surprisingly professional in timing and movement, [notwithstanding that they were inevitably, ultimately, same old same old after the fifteenth or so school]. I would imagine that choosing a winner was a crapshoot [to borrow an American cliché] It was though the carefully rehearsed introductions from a veritable legion of name by name presenters, as each school promoted itself and blew its trumpet, that really blew me away. They were, each and every one of them, pure Pandor.

I envisaged squadrons of elocution trainers being despatched from her Ministry to all the country’s model T secondary schools with a mission to extend the use of best practice English, and I joyously guzzled down a bottle of Johannisberger red, in happy tribute to a damm fine twenty minutes and a job well done..



Have a great week
Nik.